I am currently investigating RedHat 9 and found that ldap support is still far from being included :
- some bugs in the order of starting processes during boot (for example autofs is started before ldap server, although autofs is depending on ldap running for certain services).
- some packages are compiled with ldap disabled (for example samba) and some other with it (autofs, squid, balsa, sendmail). With don't compile ldap support on all package able to use it ? (I know that currently ldap support in samba is flagged as experimental, but it is working well and is in used on a lot of sites now; also it is the responsability of the administrator to use it or not, and not RedHat choice).
- some packages are very old, like apache 2.0.40 and lakes ldap support although it was added in later versions. Apache 2.0.40 was annouces in august 2002 and integrated in RedHat 8 and I was expecting to find a newer version in RedHat 9. Alas, it is still 2.0.40 and new errata (posted today for a security fix) are also still 2.0.40.
- there is no support for setting up ldap server nor ldap replication, although it is not so difficult.
- there is no support for maintaining a user database under an ldap directory.
Currently RedHat is including the basic support for ldap (i.e. nss_ldap + pamldap) and tools to configure a client computer to connect to the ldap server. I hope now to see more tools ldap enabled (on top of the list samba and apache) : it is just a matter of recompiling them.
A bigger project is to add the support for ldap server with gui tools to configure them (i.e. to bring linux to the level of Windows 2K and Active Directory (LDAP + KERBEROS).
Any comments ?
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Alain RICHARD <mailto:alain.richard@xxxxxxxxxxx>
EQUATION SA <http://www.equation.fr/>
Phone : +33 477 79 48 00 Fax : +33 477 79 48 01
client/serveur applications, network and linux engineering
