[ale] LDAP poster child

Transam@cavu.com transam at cavu.com
Mon Jun 25 00:01:11 EDT 2001


> All:

> At work there's IS mgt rumblings of eventually migrating our Solaris 2.6/8
> NIS servers, Novell 4.11 servers, and W2K/NT servers to W2K ADS for
> centralized user and directory services. I'm not up on LDAP, other than
> setting up an iPlanet LDAP app server under a consultants guidance and
> seeing some resemblance to Novell NDS object and container cfgs, thus the
> need to become pro-active. I also recognize that NIS will soon enough go
> away due to it's own limitations. (As we utilize it, NIS really doesn't save
> much SA time anyway, and I'm getting to that 'there has to be a better way'
> feeling toward it.) It's also my vague understanding that Unix LDAP must be
> in place before any migration to this ADS scheme will work. Hence, questions
> to the enlightened:

Have a look at http://www.cavu.com//pursuit.html at my links to sites
showing all of M$'s lies and use them to convince management that all of
W2K's "reliability and lower 'total cost of ownership'" is a pack of lies!

Make a requirement of the consultant be lots of Linux & Unix time (i.e.,
the consultant probably prefers them) to further help to pull management
away from the dark side.  Tell management about the 1000 security bug
alerts that M$ posted last year, the same rate so far this year, and they
only post alerts if the discoverer threatens to tell the public.

Ask the SysAdmins on this group who use both Linux and M$ which takes less
maintenance (all seem to say far more maintenance [$] for M$).

> 1). Is there a recognized definitive overview on LDAP, and if so, where is
> it? (iPlanet's site of course has their iWS and iAS sw's, and the
> documentation is pretty good, but I've not noticed anything in the way of
> basic LDAP tutorials there. And Solaris 8 comes bundled with LDAP, but it
> assumes a working knowledge to set it up.)
> 2). Has anyone done an NIS to LDAP migration? What were your experiences?

I haven't but expect pain and lost weekends!

> 3). How about this LDAP to ADS migration, anyway? Good/bad idea? Is ADS even
> available on Win2K yet? (I know that's a 'strong' Msft W2K selling point,
> but I've chosen to stay somewhat Msft ignorant as reading their hype and FUD
> isn't worth my time.)

Yeah, but M$ ads in all the publications aimed at management (InfoWeek, etc.)
claim it's far better than Unix and that Linux has a higher "total cost of
ownership".  Know thy enemy!

> 4). Am I correct in assuming Unix printers also become objects under LDAP,
> similar to printers under Novell's NDS? (If so, and given that Solaris
> printing without HP Jetadmin is rather ugly anyway IMO, that alone might be
> worth an LDAP pilot on a few Unix test servers.)

> Any related experiences, comments, testimonials, hints, tricks, caveats, and
> flames cheerfully accepted.

> Thanks.
> -fgz

> CC: MDLUG, ALE

Bob
transam at cavu.com                       [Bob's ALE Bulk email]
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