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Why nobody uses LDAP

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Re: Why nobody uses LDAP

#34

Post by hapless »

voxio wrote: post #26

Are there any free OpenLDAP alternatives out there worth mentioning?

Fedora DS is an open source fork of Netscape 5.1. RHDS is basically the same product. High-performance -- if you need tens of thousands of accounts, hundreds or thousands of simultaneous queries, a netscape derivative is what you want.

Sun ONE DS is free-as-in-beer. It's a newer derivative of the same codebase (Netscape) that became FDS.

Apache DS is something I've been experimenting with. Java-based. Easy to get up and running, comes with a really great default schema.

Sun OpenDS looked cool, but since the oracle acquisition, I can't bring myself to be interested in it.

Re: Why nobody uses LDAP

#35

Post by hapless »

stretchwithme wrote: post #11

And the L in LDAP means "Lightweight"! Maybe its just in there for comedic effect.

LDAP was derived from X.500. By comparison, it is lightweight. LDAP contained just the barest minimum structure to express X.500 data. It was originally a protocol meant for clients that were too limited to speak X.500 protocols.

Look at it this way: LDAP is to X.500 as SNTP is to NTP.

SNTP is simple, because NTP is pretty simple. LDAP is a little bit hairy because X.500 was really, really, really hairy.

Re: Why nobody uses LDAP

#37

Post by tzs »

LDAP doesn't pass the Global Disaster test. That is, if some global disaster happened and we lost most of our computing resources and had to rebuild from the ground up we would not rebuild LDAP. We'd do something much better.

I'd also put SMTP, POP3, and IMAP in this category.

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