Symas Blog

Last week Andrew Bartlett of the Samba Team posted a query about how to handle
a desired extension to LDAP. The question was cross-posted to the Samba-Technical, OpenLDAP-Technical, and Fedora-Directory-Devel mailing lists. Within a few minutes, developers from the OpenLDAP community responded, proposing a general-purpose solution. Within a few hours an implementation of the solution in OpenLDAP was made available for use. Within a few days a formal specification was made available for review/comment. This rapid progression from problem-statement to working solution is a fine example of the open source development model at work. (The Fedora project remains silent. But is that so bad?)
Read the rest of this entry »

Today I finished writing a series of patches to enhance LDAP support in Ekiga, the Gnome SIP/VOIP client. Generally I don’t pay much attention to client-side issues; my focus here at Symas tends to be on the server. And for the most part I’ve been ignoring the whole voice-chat/telephony arena because it just didn’t interest me before. But all of a sudden it’s important to me now, and my experience over the past few days pointed out a few areas we really overlooked in the past, things we will need to improve.

Read the rest of this entry »

Our colleague, Kartik Subbarao of HP, laid out his view of why HP converted to OpenLDAP from their previous proprietary Directory technology. Symas is quite convinced that this transition would not have occurred without its strong commercial technical support capability. Kartik is more eloquent on those reasons.  Kartik’s blog entry over at HP’s FOSSBazaar tells the story in a tone consistent with the story he tells at many public speaking engagements.

Read the rest of this entry »

Slashdot points to an article by a Stanford U. Professor (in a chair funded by at least 2 VCs) and a recent Stanford PhD who’s an Assistant Professor at Harvard now. Stanford’s B-School posted a summary. The original article is not available for free but the Supplement is … and it is quite helpful as it clearly shows the love of the model and the depth of the math underlying this work. This is an important question for many but the summary we get indicates (IMHO) that the model was more interesting than the actual problem they were studying.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s nice to get confirming stories published. SlashDot has a story about an old Perl bug that was still in the Red Hat distributions. It’s not clear that we can derive from this information that Red Hat failed to update their PERL as it was in packages compiled by Red Hat but distributed by CentOS. One wonders if RHEL was updated but Fedora/CentOS failed to notice? Or if RHEL still has this issue. Is it Red Hat’s responsibility to keep CentOS up to date? As such, this looks like a pretty bogus story but I love the tag line: If a Linux vendor can’t provide comprehensive maintenance and support for the open source software projects you depend on, McAllister asks, who ever will?

Read the rest of this entry »

MySQL and Symas have worked together for much of 2008 to produce a back-ndb, a back-end module for OpenLDAP that uses MySQL Cluster’s networked clustered database technology for OpenLDAP. Initially, we were concerned about how this would turn out but the advantages of the clustering technology made it worth a try. It turned out much better than expected!

MySQL (Sun) has contributed the source of this back-end to the OpenLDAP project and it is available in source from the project now. We expect it to be included in the next OpenLDAP 2.4 Release (imminent). MySQL will be offering binary distributions for selected platforms by the end of September.

Howard needs to fill in the blanks about what this really means and why it is so intriguing but we wanted to make sure the community knew that the first version of this code is available.

It is interesting to see the reaction to the Red Hat - Fedora events. We’ll leave the explanatiions to the postings at SlashDot and elsewhere. The bottom line is that there are a number of companies with proprietary software DNA and significant Wall Street pressures playing in the Open Source Software business. They want to be good community members but there are times when their other responsibilities make them act like they’re unclear on the concept.

This was one of them.

Read the rest of this entry »

Slashdot reports that there’s an old PERL performance bug still propagated by Red Hat in current releases of Red Hat derivative distributions (RHEL, Fedora, and CentOS). Fixes have been available for quite a long time and there’s no hint of when Red Hat are updating their RPMs. The tag line to the Slashdot article: If a Linux vendor can’t provide comprehensive maintenance and support for the open source software projects you depend on, McAllister asks, who ever will?

Read the rest of this entry »

A correspondent wrote:

I can definitely appreciate the difference in responsiveness. We have dealt with proprietary directory server vendors in the context of their OS products… they compete hard to be the least responsive.

Always nice to be appreciated. We try!

Back in 2005, Rich Megginson wrote this email to the Fedora-Directory-Devel list. It’s poignant. Sun hasn’t stopped hiding behind its license and you still have to make your decisions between Sun’s DS and another LDAP product on factors other than performance.

Read the rest of this entry »