Near where I live there is a diner that serves general breakfast fare. I am not much of a shopper. Hunting for bargains is not my thing. I buy only what I need. I’m an engineer. So, this particular diner has a characteristic that appeals to both my problem solving tendencies and my shopping requirements. One of the first things I noticed was that the prices of the dishes and the side dishes didn’t make a whole lot of sense. You can order pretty much anything two or more ways e.g. 2 eggs and bacon with sausages on the side, or 2 eggs and sausages with bacon on the side. Two ways, but only one way gets you the best price - you save around 50c by having sausages on the side. Suppose you want 3 eggs with that though, same answer? Nope. This menu is a true mark of genius, the rubiks cube of breakfast dining.
Then we have the case of Digital Identity World on September 11-13th next month, with an Identity Open Space on the monday. If you have a look at the registration fee for DIDW you will see that you are in for a cool 2k to step over that particular threshold on those particular days, and $300 less if you registered early. However, if you were to pony up $25 to register to attend the IOS on the Monday of that week you are entitled to a little discount at the DIDW. In fact the cost to you, gov’ner, would be $995. That’s right, early birds, the Way of the Folding Menu strikes again.
As my mother would say, if she had a blog, cheap at half the price.
Recently Carla Schroder wrote a three part series of articles on using Fedora directory server. She has some nice things to say about the server:
FDS scales nicely from tiny test systems to huge enterprise systems, which comes as no surprise to anyone who knows its history. It began life as the Netscape directory server (NDS), then became the iPlanet directory server, and then the SunONE directory server. You’ll find all of these ancestral LDAP servers still in service, handling very large loads with ease. To quote the FDS Web site: “The Fedora directory server is hardened by real world use, full featured, scales like a banshee, and already handles many of the largest LDAP deployments in the world.” So you could start your LDAP education with FDS, and stick with it as your needs grow.
Check out the articles here:
File under open source LDAP.
Brian K. Jones has blogged about his experience with the Fedora directory server. He likes it.
In contrast, the Fedora directory server has huge, enormous, steaming wads of documentation, a wiki that has a huge amount of more task-specific documentation written by those in the community who waded through one project or another and lived to tell about it, a mailing list that is extremely user-friendly, and even an IRC channel where you can talk directly to some of the folks writing the code, who are an immense help, and whose wisdom often makes it into the published wiki documentation for all to benefit from.
So, in short, Fedora directory server is a blazing fast directory server that supports multimaster replication (should you choose to use it), hot backups and restores, access control changes (and many other changes) without a server restart, running multiple instances on a single machine, and it stores its entire configuration in the directory itself, making it completely manageable using the LDAP protocol itself. If you’re a GUI fan, there’s also a graphical interface that lets you do everything from adding new users, to adding new objectclass and attribute definitions, to managing certificates and viewing logs. What’s more, with its PassSync utility, it can synchronize passwords easily with an Active directory server.
That about sums things up I’d say. Though, if you would like full enterprise support I recommend the Red Hat badged version.
