Blog: Pete Loshin

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More New Software: Fedora Directory Server 1.0

Sure, it's good to know about new software releases, but you don't need to come here for that kind of information. What's nice, for me as blogger, about new software releases is that they give me an opportunity to write a little bit about what the software does and how it is (or isn't) significant in relation to open source enterprise and business intelligence applications.

So: here's the announcement of Fedora Directory Server 1.0. What's that? The Fedora Directory Server Project is " a robust, scalable open-source server designed to manage large directories of users and resources", based on Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (technical specification in IETF RFC 3377).

What's good and interesting here? For one thing, scalability. The project claims support for "thousands of operations per second, tens of thousands of concurrent users, tens of millions of entries, hundreds of gigabytes of data SSLv3, TLSv1, and SASL for secure authentication and transport." That's pretty good.

For another, there's the professionally written documentation. Well, it's actually documentation for Red Hat Directory Server, but that's more or less the same thing as Fedora Directory Server, because the Fedora Project is more or less where Red Hat tries out technology, in an open source way, for their enterprise-worthy commercial releases. So, if you need enterprise calibre open source systems, you can try out Fedora at no cost and, if you need the enterprise calibre support you can move easily to Red Hat.

Another thing that's nice about this is that open source directory servers use an open standard, LDAP, that was developed as an open technical standard through the same organization, The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) that developed all the other protocols that run the Internet.

And, as usual, it reminds me of how it seems to me that Microsoft has historically approached the implementation of open standards: start out with a competing closed standard instead, and then eventually give in to market pressures and support the open standard by extending and embracing it. Here's a Microsoft technical report on LDAP, Active Directory LDAP Compliance.

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