Searching for a Directory Service Solution?

kumulan wonders: "I've got the responsibility to set up directory services as well as a messaging/groupware system for my organization of app. 100 employees spread out over three locations. We are a startup that is merging three existing smaller companies and, given the state of existing IS infrastructure at each of these locations, the decision has already been made that we are better off starting from scratch. It would be great to hear from Slashdot readers concerning which option is 'better' and why." "For me, the choices are stark and clear:

1. MS Exchange/Active Directory
2. A cobbled-together solution based as much as possible on OSS (as no direct equivalent exists).

For (2) we have evaluated, and are strongly considering, the following:

• Samba/OpenLDAP/Kerberos
• Bynari Insight Server for messaging/groupware.
• Nitrobit Group Policy for, you guessed it, group policy management.

Of course, Samba 4 will address some of this 'cobbling', but we can't wait for that."

Comments

Other options?

[MonoNexo]

What ever happened to Novell? I used that at the college I attended - web apps, email, directory, rempote access, etc. Is this no longer a valid option, or was it just forgotten on the above list?

Re:Other options?

[killjoe]

It's all still there, it's still viable, it's still better then what MS offers, it's still cheaper then MS.

Just because something doesn't get a lot of press doesn't mean it's gone.

There are Other Options

[Anonymous Coward]

Other Options to Consider:

Novell:
Linux Small Business Suite
http://www.novell.com/products/linuxsmallbiz/
It includes edirectory, groupwise for email, suse enterprise server,Novell ZENworks Linux Management Client

IBM (Lotus)
http://www.lotus.com/lotus/general.nsf/wdocs/nd7co ntent
You can use Domino as an ldap server.
Other IBM Software on Linux:
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/os/linux/software/
or
http://www-1.ibm.com/linux/matrix/

Re:Easy.

[zulux]

if you've a crew of MCSEs on staff who've never touched Linux, it's going to be more expensive and a bigger hastle go the OSS route.

MS's newest/latest/greatest has a large learning curve as well. You old MCSE who knows Windows Domains will have just as much trouble learning Active Directory as he would have learning Samba 3.

I've trained MCSEs in open source technology - about 50% do just fine. The otheres were paper MCSEs and sucked at Windows too.

Another Consideration

[joelleo]

What exactly is the newly merged company doing? Is it supposed to be geeky-cool? Is it doing something totally unrelated to computers or technology? Is the IT infrastructure just a means to an end - users getting their work done?

If the company is trying to do something geeky-cool, you may be best served by using a "cobbled-together" open source architecture. It'll show your boy's and girl's prowess on the console and could be used as a Hercules-on-a-pedestal showcase for your talents.

On the other hand, in either of the other two cases, you're most likely going to be using MS on the desktop and your people aren't going to care that you've implemented OpenLDAP as long as their Word, Excel and Outlook work. In this situation, as has already been noted, you'd probably be best served by implementing Windows Server 2003 + Active Directory. An additional benefit is the expertise is relatively cheap and available, and may already be in-house with your amalgamated IT staff.

Good luck!

Novell

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what your selection criteria are, but it seems to me that you have another choice: Novell's products. More specifically:
1. Directory Services: eDirectory. It runs on multiple OS platforms such as Windows, Linux, NetWare, Solaris, etc. It is more robust than AD, particularily across wan links (viz. replication). And of course it is LDAP v3 compliant so nearly any LDAP client can use it for authentication and authorization.

2. Open Enterprise Server, Linux and NetWare. For hosting your file and print services. You get the best file system out there - NSS - on either platform. Real ACL's and vastly more refined trustee assignment and inherited rights filtering capabilities than any other filesystem.

3. Groupware/Messaging: I am less experienced in the alternative offerings in this catagory, but I believe that Novell has a decent product in GroupWise 7, which runs on Windows or Linux or NetWare.

Again I don't know what your selection criteria are, but you may have skipped Novell due to lack of awareness...

Cheers.

XAD

[lukehatpadl]

Try XAD from PADL.

To Windows clients, it acts as an Active Directory domain controller, so it supports Kerberos authentication, group policies, etc. It also includes RFC 2307 support for seamless integration of Linux/UNIX clients.

cobbled-together?

[AstroDrabb]

2. A cobbled-together solution based as much as possible on OSS (as no direct equivalent exists).

Well, it sounds like you are an MS-Only type guy with limited experience outside of the proprietary MS-World. There are some excellent solutions that run under Linux. Have you looked at Novell GroupWise?

Novell GroupWise is a complete collaboration software solution that provides information workers with e-mail, calendaring, instant messaging, task management, and contact and document management functions. The leading alternative to Microsoft Exchange, GroupWise has long been praised by customers and industry watchers for its security and reliability

GroupWise is cross platform, unlike MS Exchange/AD. GroupWise has plenty of free tools to help you along the way like:

• GroupWise Migration Utility 2.0.1 for Microsoft Exchange
• GroupWise PDA Connect 1.0 SP1 Multi Lingual
• GroupWise Import Utility 2.0 for Microsoft Outlook
• GroupWise Gateway 2.0 for Async Connections
• GroupWise Gateway 3.0 for Lotus Notes

Just check out Novell to see some of their products (no, I do not work for Novell, I just like some of their products).

Also, there are some really great LDAP/IMAP type solutions you can put together under Linux for zero cost. Obviously this option requires someone more capable than your typical point-n-click "MS-Admin". It would take one employee with the ability to read a book or some docs. Though, I know your typical point-n-click "MS-Admin" wants to be able to just put in a CD and let AUTO-RUN do all the "hard" work for them.

If I personally owned a small company with ~100 employees, I would rather have one talented admin that could handle *nix/Win than 2-3 point-n-click MS "admins". If you added up the salaries, that one guy would cost you less than the 2-3 less capable point-n-click MS "admins". TIJMO (This is just my opinion).

Re:Easy.

[sillypixie]

I think you are missing more than a few options there.

IBM has directory services.

Sun has directory services.

Novell has directory services.

My thoughts:

- the problem with IBM's directory is that it sits on top of DB2. This abrogates one of the coolest parts about directories - that you don't need a DBA. And a mistuned IBM directory is an ugly, ugly thing.

- the Sun/Netscape/iPlanet/SJSDS-whatever-they-call-it-t his-second tends to run well directly out-of-the-box without the need for much in the way of expertise, in smaller environments. I would call this directory the defacto standard (although this statement may now be obsoleted by the advance of AD - hard to say). If you are using other SUN infrastructure, or if you are using the Sun Calendaring/Messaging product (which I would recommend as a very solid alternative to MS exchange), this DS is an excellent choice.

- Novell - well if you are a Novell shop, you will use NDS. You will use everything else Novell has. It is sort of like joining a secret cult.

- OSS - I would consider this an advanced option. My suggestion is, if you know nothing about directory services, that you would be better off with something a little more... packaged. I'm sure many here will rabidly disagree with me, but I certainly would consider that choice as risky. A second issue is that many LDAP-enabled products that you may wish to run on top of your directory layer (provisioning, WSSO, etc) only support commercial directory servers.

- Microsoft - well, you're probably going to have to install this one anyways, in order to get a LAN. Although I'm a unix chick at heart, I must admit that I have seen many well-run AD directories. If you aren't already in the UNIX world for any good reason, AD is probably a logical direction. Many many companies have cut their directory services teeth this way. The disadvantage is that your Enterprise Directory is also your NOS, which can be a pain from a licensing perspective, if you want to store authentication-only users as well.

FWIW, hope that helps...

Maybe not so easy.

[jd]

Let us say that you build a direct equiv. in Linux. "Impossible!" I hear you cry! Well, maybe not. Not unless you've cracked into my machine and installed an MP3 of yourself.

Anyways, let us examine the different components and see how far OSS can take us. Maybe it can't go the whole journey, but if it can do some, then a hybrid solution will work.

Open Groupware, SuSE's Open Exchange and OSER will handle the Exchange part, including support for all those MS Exchange clients, such as Outlook.

That just leaves the Active Directories part. ISC's DHCP supports Dynamic DNS. However, you may want to add in DHCP2LDAP to get a good link between DHCP and BIND. OpenLDAP provides the LDAP implementation part. Kerberos and DNS are easy (although some may quibble with my choice of Kerberos version!)

Provided you're not planning on having both MS Active Directory and the above amalgam running, you should then be set to go with a comprehensive Active Directory lookalike which will interact with client systems in the same way Microsoft's software will.

The problem I found is that there's almost no way of getting from a Linux solution -to- Active Directory. If AD is present, it must be a root server, which Linux CAN pull from.

Do I recommend this kind of a setup? Probably not. The Exchange and Groupware stuff should be fine, but the Active Directory stuff isn't as coherent as it could be and I've heard of nobody who has completely replace AD with an Open Source solution, even though from a purely technical perspective it should be possible.

Re:one caveat

[Raspberry]

Actually I can say I worked on one of the largest directories in the world... over 52 million user objects and hundreds of millions of objects.

AD does not scale well. Senior Mgmt wanted to move from eDirectory to AD due to some price breaks on desktop os and MSOffice for over 50000 employees... so we made the attempt with Microsoft in house providing consulting services... they eventually admitted even they couldn't get it stable in our large distributed environent... during the one year migration troubleshooting process we had contractors restarting servers in hundreds of locations around the clock.

We're now back on Novell eDirectory with Open Enterprise Server and stable again.

Re:3. Mac OS X Server

[plsuh]

Open directory is (as I understand it) basically openLDAP with a config file and a nice GUI.

Open Directory covers a lot more than LDAP. Yes, it's based on OpenLDAP -- in part. Yes, there is a nice GUI, which you can use to administer users and groups remotely, from another Mac OS X machine.

But there's also MIT Kerberos, integrated with the LDAP. When you create a user in Open Directory, the necessary Kerberos principals are created for that user. User identification (linking usernames with Kerberos principals and home directories) happens automatically.

But wait, there's more -- there's also the Apple Password Server, which is based on the SASL layer from CMU. This provides centralized, non-Kerberos password support, for things like CRAM-MD5 authentication, or NTLMv2 auth for Samba. The Password Server passwords are automaticaly synchronized with the Kerberos passwords. When you change a user password in the KDC the corresponding password is also changed in the Password Server or vice versa.

Still not happy? How about built-in replication support for load-balancing and high availablility. It covers not only the LDAP database via slurpd but also the Kerberos and Password Server databases?

Oh, and one more thing -- encrypted archiving built in to the GUI. Archive your entire set of LDAP user information and your password database to an encrypted disk image. Secure and convenient.

(Yes, I work for Apple -- but the parent post misses most of the good parts.)

--Paul

Easy: Novell

[ImaLamer]

Novell - well if you are a Novell shop, you will use NDS. You will use everything else Novell has. It is sort of like joining a secret cult.

Not true, you can use Novell's NDS (eDirectory, the LDAP server software) right on top of Linux, Unix, or Windows. The admin tools are almost all Java based or otherwise accessible so you aren't locked in there (clients and management tools for Linux, Unix and Windows). Novell can manage the rights, er permissions, er privileges for clients of any flavor (because a directory services solution is about managing the resources on the network) - and has less bloat and more security than Active Directory.

Novell is my choice hands down. It isn't the nightmare product it used to be. Quite flexable, scalable and for all intents and purposes "open". This product actually follows standards! In my experience it also prices cheaper for clients than Active Directory, although you never know because I'm sure it has changed.

The person who asked this question initially said that the only other option to Active Directory was A cobbled-together solution based as much as possible on OSS (as no direct equivalent exists)

This simply isn't true. There is eDirectory and it's better! (PDF) Wake up people! It's 2005 and there is a better option out there and to top it all off they are a Linux company too.