Fedora Directory Replica of Sun Directory Master

I've already posted this to the Fedora Directory User List. After downloading the Fedora Directory rpms to a Red Hat Enterprise 3 on HP Vectra desktop yesterday, I did a quick install of the server as a consumer directory. I then went up to my company development LDAP master, which runs Sun One Directory 5.1 SP2 on Solaris/Sparc (an E220, I think), and set up a replication agreement to push the directory out to the new Fedora consumer. That was it. Within 25 minutes of running rpm -ivh *RHEL4*.rpm, I was able to make queries against the consumer and to verify that changes on the master were flowing out to it. Not bad.

Today I had a chance to play with this setup some more, and deploy the Fedora DS to a couple of Fedora Core 3 machines. All had already been preinstalled by me with Sun's Java SDK 1.4.2, configured through the alternatives system, and had their own little java.sh script in /etc/profiles.d to make the Java environment universal. About the only problem I've had is an inability to launch the Directory Console in a remote X session. While other Java apps run fine remotely, the DS Console is stubbornly refusing the play ball. I had similar problems with the Sun One 5.x Console though (don't remmember it with the 4.x one), so I'm not letting it get me down. At home I've configured my two test LDAP servers to use multi-master replication, and hope to be able to experiment some with the DSML Gateway and try my hand at some ad hoc Samba integration. At work the bosses are asking about the included Windows Password Sync, but I'm going to try to hold them up for a firm commitment on some new x86 hardware to migrate the present environment to Red Hat.

In the meantime, I've begun planning my "sabbatical", 8 weeks of paid leave that employees at my company get after 7 years of service. Our current plans will take us down to the North Carolina shore for a week, up inland and then back North through Virginia and Maryland before returning to Long Island. I've already told my bosses that I'm going to be leaving not only my pager behind (a sacred tradition for those on sabbatical), but also my company laptop. The kids were happy to hear that, that laptop is too often a rival for my attention. Over a decade ago I bailed out of the legal profession in part to be able to spend more time with my family. Although IT has been very good to us, sometimes it can be as jealous a mistress as the law ever was. Keeping the job in its proper place is one of those constant battles, like mosquito control, you just have to keep plugging away at.

Red Hat Directory Server Announced

Not really news at this point, but today Red Hat announced the open sourcing of the former Netscape Directory Server as the "Red Hat Directory Server". Like it's Enterprise Linux product, the directory would be available on a subscription basis. Further development will be conducted within a new Directory Project within the Fedora Project. I knew something was up when I stumbled across the newly rebranded Red Hat product documentation on their site last week. How big a deal is this? Well, last I checked (about 1 minute ago) the new Fedora Directory site is not responding, obviously as the result of being hammered by a multitude of engineers like myself who are looking the long-awaited source code for this directory product. Will this sideline OpenLDAP? I certainly hope not. That open source rival has improved so much in performance and reliability over the last 2 years that I and many others think it's more than ready for the enterprise. Benchmarks released by Symas Corporation, show the overall performance of their commercial OpenLDAP based directory matching that of the Netscape product that Red Hat purchased. I intend to continue developing solutions with OpenLDAP, while at the same time taking the plunge into the new Fedora Directory as soon as I can get the code.