28 October 06 - 22:57At Last! A Chink In the Armor

HP IS USING OpenLDAP FOR ITS ENTERPRISE DIRECTORIES! Read all about it here. This is the first non-LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PERL/Python/PHP) Open Source Project product deployed in the fabric of a leading global enterprise's Information Technology infrastructure (to our collective knowledge). You'd think it would be news.

Those of you who read this page and/or know anything about OpenLDAP probably know that Howard Chu, mentioned in the article as a key contributor to this work, is a Founder and Chief Architect of Symas Corp.. The speaker, Ragavan Srinivassan, neglected to mention Symas or the fact that the OpenLDAP code HP uses is a version of OpenLDAP that's not yet released by the OpenLDAP Project. HP is running Symas's Connexitor™ Directory Services (CDS) that contains code developed for HP, partially at HP's expense. The unreleased code is scheduled for OpenLDAP 2.4 (now in Alpha) but Symas's customers have been using it for a long time.

So, this story is not just about all the great work of the OpenLDAP Project but it's about HP's leadership in helping strategic Open Source Projects take the last step to Enterprise Readiness. It is also a story about the emergence of credible business models for commercial technical support for mission critical Open Source Software Products. (more)

- CDS - one comment / No trackbacks - § ¶

26 October 06 - 04:36Symas to offer support for Oracle Directory Server?

<joke>Following in the footsteps of MySQL's response to Oracle's plan to support Red Hat's OS, at least as reported, Symas is considering offering annual support contracts for technical support of the Oracle9i Directory Services product. Of course, since the source code is not available, it will be impractical to provide fixes for defects but at least customers will have a central list of all known and reported bugs and an objective third party ( ) to track them. (more)

- CDS - one comment / No trackbacks - § ¶

23 October 06 - 04:09Vintela Discovered!

John Udell wrote a nice piece about Vintela at Inforworld. It has good disclosure about the relationship between Microsoft and Quest as well as a pretty good overview of both the problem and Vintela's solution.

The payoff line? "... this kind of solution represents the worst kind of vendor lock-in." We agree with that point of view. We'd also mention that Vintela's not cheap either. Symas thinks Open Source solutions avoid both problems.link. (more)

- Identity - one comment / No trackbacks - § ¶

15 October 06 - 10:50Apache DS

Let us add our congratulations on the release of Apacher Directory Services.. A true 1.0 is quite an achievement.

Agreeing with Neil, friendly competition is good for the community. We endorsed open-sourcing the Netscape Directory Server as Fedora Directory Services and look forward to understanding the new ideas and approaches from this and OpenDS as time goes forward.

- Open Source - No comments / No trackbacks - § ¶

06 October 06 - 07:07Crowing Too Much?

Pete Rowley said:

Frankly it does not reflect well that you continue to proclaim the greatness of your solution at the expense of FDS based on features that have long been part of FDS and have only recently shown up in OL.

I look at it the other way: OpenLDAP has covered more ground in the past five years than other products have in ten. That speaks volumes about the energy behind OpenLDAP and the Project's commitment to excellence. From being the poor broken toy server in 2000 to the fastest server on the planet today, capable of handling the largest databases under high-performance loads, our pace of development has been in high gear and continues to accelerate, while other products like Sun DS 5.x coast to a stop.

- OpenLDAP - three comments / No trackbacks - § ¶

06 October 06 - 04:45Rant 2 Update

First, David Boreham tried to reply again and this Blog's software is stopping both him and me from adding additional comments. Pete Rowland succeeded. David's comment (see below) was informative and supportive. Pete's (see his in the thread of the last entry) continues the flame war I invited with the first snarky posting. My comment reply would have been:

Actually, Pete, configured correctly, MirrorMode acts exactly like Single Master mode. That is what you'd ultimately like MMR to do but the loose consistency replication model doesn't allow for that. Several customers have walked through the details with us and come to the conclusion that this provides the reliability capabilities they might have otherwise accepted the risks associated with MMR to solve." (more)

- OpenLDAP - No comments / No trackbacks - § ¶