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Fedora Directory Server 1.0 Released!
LnxAddct writes "NewsForge is reporting that the first official release of the Fedora Directory Server has been announced. This is good news for members of the open source community longing for an easy to use, enterprise class directory server. Fedora Directory Server is based off of Netscape Directory Server which Red Hat purchased a year ago and released as open source. Screenshots are available on their site." NewsForge is a Slashdot sister site.
One of the net things is if you couple together Kerberos with LDAP - much like a windows network
with Active Directory.
Does the Fedora DS intergrate those two neatly, single sign on is neat, but OSS provides
no turnkey solutions for this (yet).
This isn't exactly the first time RedHat has done something like this. Last year, they also bought Sistina and released GFS for free. I think they have done other such things as well, but I can't remember any off the top of my head.
The addition of a user is pretty simple... Just run ldapadd against an ldif file. To create the LDIF file is simple and you can do it with a perl script to specify username, userid and password. To create the password you can use crypt or md5. Something like:
.. 'z', 'A' .. 'Z', 0 .. 9, '.', '/');
my @validsalt = ('a'
my $salt = $validsalt[rand(64)] . $validsalt[rand(64)];
my $test = crypt($cleartext, $salt);
Of course, you'd also want to do some basic validation of the inputs. Then just wrap the user inputs in an LDIF template and run. It sounds a lot more difficult than it actually is.
The schema can actually validate that userid is unique, but you should check anyway and also validate the groups and gids.
As another poster has already stated, it's not the first time that RedHat has bought something and then changed the license to an open-source license.
However, this story is just a bit more complicated.
RedHat open-sourced all of the code they could, which was quite a bit, but originally just the main directory daemon, ns-slapd, a few shared libraries and command-line tools were open source. The real news here is that the last of the "other" bits have finally been re-written under a new (open-source) license.
That's part of the motivation for resetting the release nubmer; note that this is verison "1.0" instead of (grumbles about memory) 8 or 9?
So now, it is a 100% open source solution, no more binary-only rpms.
Heh, you severly underestimate Red Hat's contribution to the community:) Read this for a truncated list of contributions they've made. Some other products they've purchased and released include GFS, Cygwin, and eCos. They also contribute more code to the kernel than any other entity and in large part maintain and extend glib and GCC (they have a few people on the GCC board and contribute huge amounts of code, in fact many of the newest features in GCC 4.0.x you can thank Red Hat for). Here is another list, but that list is only for projects hosted from that site, so its not complete either, but suffice it to say that Red Hat does a staggering amount for the community, its kind of a shame when people bash them.
Regards,
Steve