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

command line

[Darkon]

A fancy GUI is all very well, but does this come with some decent command line tools to scriptify adding and removing users and the like? One of the things that's kept my department on NIS for so long is that absolute hideous unfriendliness of the OpenLDAP tools vs useradd, usermod and friends.

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:command line

[digitalhermit]

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:

    my @validsalt = ('a' .. 'z', 'A' .. 'Z', 0 .. 9, '.', '/');
    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.

Re:command line

[Anonymous Coward]

It is so totally NOT built on top of OpenLDAP. In fact, it share not code with OpenLDAP at all. Thanks for playing.

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: wow

[Dolda2000]

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.

Re:wow

[LnxAddct]

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

+ Kerberos ?

[ratatask]

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).

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

Re:+ Kerberos ?

[rhinoX]

Actually, it's not always $notnerd vs. $nerd. I am a nerd in every sense of the word. I understand the technology as well, if not better than any other nerd. I also understand that in my company, my technical talents are better used to _produce new products_ for us to sell to our clients and thus make more money. Screwing around with configuration files, etc. is a _waste of my time_. I just want a directory service that allows single sign-on so I can easily add resources and people to the organization without having to freaking script my own mgmt console around some lame-ass command line tools because someone out there thinks that you have to use a CLI to "understand technology".

Gentoo package?

[nighty5]

Anyone know if there is a gentoo package for this? - Even if it's not the most up to date.

I've searched used such strings as "ldap", "nss", "directory" etc - but nothing comes up too interesting.

Re:Interesting, but is it Good Enough(tm)?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, what the hell are you talking about? That was the most mindless post I have ever seen.

The first problem is that Netscape probably didn'tadd much to their Directory Service towards the end, and it is unclear how much Fedora has had to put resources into code cleanups and bug fixes, as opposed to adding the capabilities it is going to need.

Red Hat / Fedora Team spent about a year cleaning it up and porting it to linux, or didn't you bother to read the summary?

For this directory server to be of much interest to network administrators, this package absolutely must support two-way communication with Microsoft Active Directory's LDAP. It can support more - and it would be great if, for once, Open Source "embraced and extended" something from The Other Side...

Uh? What does it need? 3-way communication with AD? 4-way? Active Directory is just a bastardized for of LDAP, and even OpenLdap includes the bits needed to work with it. What you are saying here doesn't make any sense.

To be of interest to system admins, it needs to work with PAM and preferably one of the standard "unified" admin interfaces, like Webmin or (yes, it is still used) linuxconf, in addition to specialized tools.

What you are saying here demostrates a complete ignorance of PAM, LDAP, and directory services in general. PAM has long supported LDAP, as has the NSS libraries. Webmin and Linuxconf are two interfaces the people have added as a layer on top of existing services. Nothing NEEDS to work with them, they support whatever they want. FDS has a great GUI and that is the point. Otherwise, an LDAP service is a usefull as the schema you load and how you implement it.

I like Fedora's distro, it is simply that if they are neglectful of something they can do in a script and a makefile, and of mere patches they had already made public, then how confident can I be of their ability to maintain a very complex piece of software?

Ok, seriously, get a clue. If you are looking for assurance, pony up some cash and buy the fully supported Red Hat Directory Server. Frankly, I think the entire Fedora effort is great, but I wouldn't run any substatinal business on it. For that I pay for Red Hat.

ldap schmel-dap

[Anonymous Coward]

My employer recently tried to "enchance" our application to authenticate to an LDAP directory rather than our traditional backend security server. Wow, is LDAP ever NOT the tool for that job.

There are so few standards around LDAP authentication that it is impossible to support "LDAP" - you have to support MS Active Directory, Oracle Info Server, Novell eDir, etc..

For example, there is no standard way to handle password expiration. Every directory does it differently. There is no standard location or hashing algorithm for user passwords, nor is there any sort of standard password policy (password complexity rules, maximum retries until lockout, etc)

So we basically had to rewrite support for all these things that we already had in a modular fashion so now administrators are stuck configuring "the AD plugin", or "the OIS plugin".. ... but anyway, LDAP thinks it's all that and a bag of potato chips, but I'm here to tell you it is NOT.

Not the first time.

[ebuck]

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.

Re:Interesting, but is it Good Enough(tm)?

[Temkin]

Red Hat / Fedora Team spent about a year cleaning it up and porting it to linux, or didn't you bother to read the summary?

"Porting to Linux" is and of itself a mindless statement, since this is Netscape DS, aka iPlanet DS, which is an antique fork of Sun's current SJES DS, all of which have been running on Linux for better part of a decade.

It will be interesting to compare Fedora DS to Sun's current offering. Sun even provides an open source tool for this called SLAMD.

Re:Nice to see

[jbellows_20]

A real solution would be a policy engine, an actual application that read policies from an enterprise server then took those policies and applied them to the workstation. Take that and give it an interface (whether gui or tui) to allow the management of the different policies. I've looked around and there isn't much. Zenworks from Novell is supposed to be able to do this but haven't had time to setup a test system to see what it can do. As much as one might hate Microsoft, he/she has to admit that their Enterprise management tools are one of the best out of very few options.