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.

+ Kerberos ?

[ratatask]

One of the net things is if you couple together Kerberos [mit.edu] 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: 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: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.

Re:About the console

[Anonymous Coward]

User error, hit any person at keyboard to continue.

It is probably trying to do some kind of lookup, ipv6 or your nameservice, you did configure your /etc/nsswitch.conf to look at the nameserver, not the local ldap server (recursive lookups are bad ! )

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:wow

[TheRaven64]

As another poster pointed out, Sun have done this with other things as well. One example that I suspect a lot of /.ers are familar with is Cygwin - bought be RedHat and open sourced. They are also not the only company to do this. Sun bought a German outfit called Star Division and released their flagship product as open source, and continue to supply most of the developer time to it. You might have used that too.

Re:Java Enterprise System from Sun is better produ

[allenw]

... and will be opened as well. [slashdot.org] I can't help but think that RH rushed this out the door to counter Sun.

But does anyone really want an older version that's likely been untouched for years?

Re:command line

[aaronl]

You could use the IDEALX smbldap-tools for the scripts and all. That would give you UNIX and Samba authentication and user account information, and control over groups, as well as a simple command line tool for passwords.

Re:Java Enterprise System from Sun is better produ

[Anonymous Coward]

Better - how exactly, care to explain? Last I saw both started from same code base a few years ago and today both have more or less the same feature set (Heck even the screen shots are a proof that the admin console is 95% the same). And you have the Fedora Directory sources with you today - so if you find (like me) that the Sun Directory works only with RHEL 3 and 4 (it comes with a installer binary which is built to install RPM packages and doesn't work with anything other than RHEL) then you are much better off with downloading the Fedora DS sources and making a change or two to get it to run on your fav distro.

And it's definitely not a "older version untouched for years" - it's been in active development since all the years and that's how the feature set is almost same as Sun's version and it's ported to compile with fully open source software - they spent a year on that. And these are mature commercial products with more features than anyone might require at a time and so the development rate is slow and limited to bug fixes most times. Years have passed by since Sun has added a significant feature to it's DS - remember the last release supported only Redhat 7.2 until recently!

As far as support goes, you can buy it from Redhat or Sun as the case may be but then we aren't comparing products there - I don't know how Redhat support for the DS would be but I have used Sun support for their DS and it wasn't exactly extraordinary - we had to live with the problems.

So, what was your point again?

Re:wow

[LnxAddct]

Heh, you severly underestimate Red Hat's contribution to the community:) Read this [fedoraproject.org] for a truncated list of contributions they've made. Some other products they've purchased and released include GFS [redhat.com], Cygwin [cygwin.com], and eCos [sourceware.org]. 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 [sourceware.org] 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

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

[talksinmaths]

"Porting to Linux" wasn't the best verbage the AC could have used, but it doesn't quite descend to the level of 'mindless statement'. The fedora developers have worked to make DS for Linux a better product. For example the 1.0 release uses apache + mod_nss instead of the ns-httpd server, and the performance improvement is impressive. Of course the non-Linux platforms for which they produce DS presumably also reap these benefits, but it seems to me that the primary motivation is to make a great Linux product.