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.

Comments

wow

[know1]

redhat bought something usefull and made it open source? that's one of the most amazingly good things i've heard this week. i thought open source was all about using software made for free. it's so great to see a xcompany making a living off open source to buy something usefull the community needs and give it out for free. i'm a debian man myself, but keep up the good work redhat!

Re:command line

[Anonymous Coward]

In short: Yes.

However, I find it interesting that you describe OpenLDAP as "absolute hideous unfriendliness" when it simply isn't that case. Granted that the ldif format isn't obvious or familiar, using the command lines tools is actually rather simple. You only need to understand how an LDAP Directory works, and how your schema of choice is laid out.

I have personall written a front end for managing userspace in OpenLDAP via bash scripts, and I can tell you that once I spen a hour reading up on ldif, it was really quite simple.

Re:+ Kerberos ?

[Dolda2000]

but OSS provides no turnkey solutions for this (yet).

Maybe this is just me, but I've never understood why people need "turnkey solutions" for things like these. Updating your LDAP, Kerberos, NSS and PAM configs manually isn't exactly hard as it is. If you want to make it easy to set up multiple workstations with this setup, just use Kickstart (or a shell script on NFS...).

Really, I'm not trying to troll here, I'm just really not seeing what this need to click a single button for every possible setup comes from. Rather than trying to provide every possible setup from the start, as Microsoft does (and which much of the complexity in Windows derives from), isn't it better to have a generic solution that can be tailored to one's specific need, instead?

Re:+ Kerberos ?

[moreati]

Maybe this is just me, but I've never understood why people need "turnkey solutions" for things like these.

Largely, I think it boils down to - 'because they don't understand the technology as we do'. Take a simple, high level requirement: identity management. You or I might see that in terms of the components: such as a directory, an authentication service, creation & removal scripts, some means of replication, monitoring scripts etc.

A $notnerd sees the requirement as a black box, they don't care about the internals. They've probably been told by some techie/salesman that it will address some problem they have. For this person turnkey seems perfect, $company sells $product which is billed as an 'identity managment solution'. A magic black box solution to a black box problem, their work is done - now it is IT's problem.

Updating your LDAP, Kerberos, NSS and PAM configs manually isn't exactly hard as it is. If you want to make it easy to set up multiple workstations with this setup, just use Kickstart (or a shell script on NFS...).

To you it isn't, but what happens when you leave? It's much easier to recruit someone to maintain a push button solution, than a partly bespoke ecology of components and scripts. Often the solution and the ecology are similar in complexity, but the solution hides that behind a GUI and glossy marketting material.

Purchasers often chose to spend their money on specialised software (solutions), hopefully saving time. We often choose to spend our time customising general purpose software, hopefully saving money.

Alex