Tons of economic research on ((dis)advantages) of use of FLOSS and Open Standards in government has been conducted by UNU MERIT in their FLOSS: Policy Support programme.
Besides that, depending on your audience and/or the specific IT portfolio you're addressing, cost might not be a strong argument, and it's certainly not the only one. Perhaps you also need to identify more intrinsic benefits such as government transparancy and "digital durability".
For a quiet (fanless) low-powered and small but inexpensive and complete PC (utp,serial,parallel,usb,vga,tv-out, etc.) you might want to check out the OpenBrick
It boots off a Compact Flash card - FreeBSD and Mandrake images available, and optionally supports a HD
Secret? Undocumented? This is what LDAP is all about. Read-over-write optimization in Directory exists by virtue of indexing.
BTW, you only need to index the attributes you use in search filters, anything else is wasted disk space and CPU cycles.
Having been involved in numerous corporate scale Directory deployments as a consultant, I think I can safely say you're underestimating LDAP, or rather, have a too narrow view of what it's for. Of course, Directory Datastores are a concept of a datamodel, and LDAP is both a protocol by which to access the data, and a way of representing it.
The inherent flexibility of datamodelling in LDAP is precisely why you won't find the equivalent of 'useradd' as a generic tool. LDAP is not a replacement for/etc/passwd, it _can_ be. But what if the user in question also has associated with them an x.509 certificate, a maildir, an out-of-office-autoreply msg,.. well you get the point. Besides, it doesn't have to be a user you're representing in the Directory. Might as well be a machine, a network, or a customer, or a collection of urls (think roaming bookmarks)
So, in your specific situation; you roll your own. Get ldap client library wrappers for your favourite script language (Perl and PHP have excellent modules available, even if PHP's is a bit 'strange' on multidimensional arrays when dealing with multiple results/multiple values to an attribute), add twenty-or-so lines of business logic, some nice HTML tags, and Bob's your uncle:)
Don't be intimidated, you'll get two steps closer to enlightenment in the process.
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Tons of economic research on ((dis)advantages) of use of FLOSS and Open Standards in government has been conducted by UNU MERIT in their FLOSS: Policy Support programme.
Besides that, depending on your audience and/or the specific IT portfolio you're addressing, cost might not be a strong argument, and it's certainly not the only one. Perhaps you also need to identify more intrinsic benefits such as government transparancy and "digital durability".
If that gets one into the Dire Straits, I'd say one was pretty succesful in creating a career in music...
For a quiet (fanless) low-powered and small but inexpensive and complete PC (utp,serial,parallel,usb,vga,tv-out, etc.) you might want to check out the OpenBrick
It boots off a Compact Flash card - FreeBSD and Mandrake images available, and optionally supports a HD
Heh, why not require MS Passport for voting, that should eliminate, or at least reveal multiple voting :)
Secret? Undocumented? This is what LDAP is all about. Read-over-write optimization in Directory exists by virtue of indexing.
BTW, you only need to index the attributes you use in search filters, anything else is wasted disk space and CPU cycles.
Having been involved in numerous corporate scale Directory deployments as a consultant, I think I can safely say you're underestimating LDAP, or rather, have a too narrow view of what it's for. Of course, Directory Datastores are a concept of a datamodel, and LDAP is both a protocol by which to access the data, and a way of representing it. The inherent flexibility of datamodelling in LDAP is precisely why you won't find the equivalent of 'useradd' as a generic tool. LDAP is not a replacement for /etc/passwd, it _can_ be. But what if the user in question also has associated with them an x.509 certificate, a maildir, an out-of-office-autoreply msg, .. well you get the point. Besides, it doesn't have to be a user you're representing in the Directory. Might as well be a machine, a network, or a customer, or a collection of urls (think roaming bookmarks)
So, in your specific situation; you roll your own. Get ldap client library wrappers for your favourite script language (Perl and PHP have excellent modules available, even if PHP's is a bit 'strange' on multidimensional arrays when dealing with multiple results/multiple values to an attribute), add twenty-or-so lines of business logic, some nice HTML tags, and Bob's your uncle :)
Don't be intimidated, you'll get two steps closer to enlightenment in the process.