[KLUG Members] Netscape/Fedora Directory Server ?

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Mon, 2005-06-06 at 16:27 -0400, Bruce Smith wrote:
> "Red Hat releases Netscape Directory Server to OSS":
> http://directory.fedora.redhat.com/wiki/Main_Page
> 
> For those of us who've been procrastinating on installing an LDAP
> server, how does this compare to OpenLDAP?  If you were installing a new
> LDAP server today, what would you experienced LDAP users go with?

It is too early to say.  

1.) FDS does somethings that OpenLDAP doesn't do: Four way multimaster
1.1.) A reasonable argument can be made that the "need" for multimaster
indicates a poorly designed network; it is the knee-jerk reaction to
creating more availability - rather than analyzing what really results
in non-availability.
2,) FDS does somethings that OpenLDAP 2.2.x doesn't do: Hot schema
changes
2.1.) OpenLDAP 2.3.x does this.
3.) OpenLDAP does some things FDS doesn't do: Federation of non-LDAP
data sources.
4.) They both use the same on-disk backend for primary storage (BDB) so
I'd be surprised if there are any staggering performance differences.
5.) FDS (or at least Netscape DS) offers some administrative tools OL
doesn't.
5.1.) It remains to be seen how open or free these tools will be.

Netscape DS didn't have the world's greatest reputation for performance
or ease-of-administration but that may be (a) a perception forged on
less than recent versions or (b) just something inherent in the
complexity of directory servers.  I *KNOW* some people moved off
Netscape DS to OpenLDAP for scalability reasons - but I don't know if
that is because the product sucked or they were incompetent
administrators who didn't bother to tune it.

I intend to check it out further.

We did try to evaluate Netscape DS years ago,  but Netscape even then
wasn't terribly interested in selling, supporting, or pitching their
product.  What that means for the state of the current code remains to
be seen (I harbor some suspicions of moldy code).