Three cheers

Three cheers

Posted Jun 9, 2005 10:02 UTC (Thu) by ringerc (guest, #3071)
Parent article: Red Hat's directory server

As a network admin, this has me mopping up a puddle of drool. We've had OpenLDAP for ages, which does its job very well. Unfortunately, it's (a) it almost feels like it fights you every step of the way when configuring things - to the point where tcpdump is the easiest way to debug most LDAP issues, and (b) it's a screaming nightmare to make most things talk to and work with an LDAP directory.

RH putting in real effort to get everybody using sensible and where possible CONSISTENT schema and concepts would be awesome. It sounds like they do plan do to just that, in terms of being proactive with projects and encouraging better LDAP support. This is where OpenLDAP has always fallen down from the admin perspective - it's a great tool, but often hard to see how to use well in your apps, and there's no "push" from the OpenLDAP folks to encourage more - and better - adoption.

Even things that are *obvious* candidates for LDAP use weird, inconsistent, and under-documented approaches. Find me two MTAs that use the same scheme for aliases - where the admin doesn't have to write the schema themselves first. Then there's Evolution, with it's LDAP write support for address books - but only with an evo specific schema, and Thunderbird, which solves that by just not being able to write to LDAP.

Any reduction in this frustration would be fantastic. I don't know about a full "settings-in-ldap" system ... it'd need a way to store the documentation with the settings, like a commented config file, and it'd need to avoid the limitations gconf has (and the consequent crime of apps just lobbing XML blobs into gconf). Hell, most apps are still a nightmare to configure centrally at all, in any way.

Something for general policy would just be awesome, though ... easy to set global defaults, icon visibility / quicklaunch contents, WM styles, search paths, etc etc.

I also do a bit of app development, so I'll be watching this with interest. Any sort of config library - so long as it's TOOLKIT AGNOSTIC, flexible, not too complicated for simple things, and ideally can even be used on other platforms - will be viewed with extreme interest.

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