Re: [SAGE] What Directory Services do you currently use?

[Brad Knowles <brad@shub-internet.org>]

On 10/8/07, Bill Morris wrote:

>   We are planning to try to narrow our directory services to
>  one; the choice being eDir (Novell Directory Services) or
>  AD (Microsoft's Active Directory).

I had a large Enterprise customer in the Netherlands (~4000 users in 
the Eindhoven area, ~8000 world-wide), and they did some pretty 
exhaustive testing of directory services options.

They looked at everything available for Windows and Unix (both 
Solaris and Linux), and the only solution they found that could do 
everything they wanted was Novell's Global Directory Service.

GDS is an LDAP-based server that is actually very scalable (unlike 
most other LDAP servers at the time, either open-source or 
commercial), but they have proprietary plug-ins that they provide to 
fully enable Windows clients, and IIRC Macintosh clients (they 
weren't going to be using the Mac services, but the feature was 
there), as well as Unix clients.

GDS was the only scalable cross-platform solution that they found.


Personally, I try to live my life as Microsoft-free as possible, to 
the point where I had a serious debate with myself as to whether or 
not I actually wanted to buy one of the new MacBook laptops since 
they are based on Intel chips and that would mean that I would now be 
physically capable of installing Windows, although I would refuse to 
do so regardless of who the order came from.

That said, I can appreciate the desire for a cross-platform solution, 
and given my experience I can certainly appreciate the desire for a 
scalable solution.

When you're storing over a hundred data elements for each user (among 
other things, enabling single sign-on for multiple platforms), and 
you're going to re-architect virtually everything in your system to 
depend on the directory server, you really, really want to make sure 
that the system is going to be able to handle the load.

Surprisingly enough, GDS appears to be able to do so.


I can't speak for eDir -- is that the new name, or is that a different product?

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad@shub-internet.org>
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>