Symas Blog

The past couple weeks have been pretty busy here at Symas, and I wanted to take a moment to recap what’s been going on. The week of May 18-22 I was teaching a week of LDAP as part of our LDAP University curriculum, here in Los Angeles. 8 hours after that completed I was flying to Barcelona, Spain for the Ubuntu Developer Summit. Interspersed through that I was chasing down some particularly elusive problems with Samba4 on OpenLDAP. Thankfully those issues have been resolved and new releases are due out soon.

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The Linux Foundation is running the first LinuxCon in Portland, Oregon, USA, in September, 2009. Linus Torvalds will be keynoting this convention and it is shaping up to be quite an interesting event in its own right.

On behalf of the community, Symas has made arrangements for the Foundation to host an International Convention on LDAP (LDAPCon) immediately before the main LinuxCon events. Attendees at LDAPCon will be pre-registered for LinuxCon to follow! There were attempts to set up an LDAPCon in 2008 after the first such convention in 2007 in Germany. All agreed it was an important topic and that there were plenty of both speakers and attendees interested but 2008 passed without a convention. We hope we still have time to make 2009’s edition a success!

This is late breaking news and the Program Committee has not yet been confirmed (Howard and I will handle submissions until the other members agree to serve). The intent is to have a wide-ranging and open discussion of topics of interest to all directory services technology users, developers, and architects. Check out the announcement pages, submit papers, register at the LinuxCon site and join us in Portland!

MySQL (Sun, Oracle?) is hosting a Webinar “Guide to Scaling OpenLDAP with MySQL Cluster” on June 24th at 10:00AM PST. Howard Chu, CTO of Symas Corporation, will be the primary technical presenter. This is going to be a repeat of the great pitch we did at the MySQL Conference in Santa Clara. This is a terrific introduction to the OpenLDAP Driver for MySQL Cluster for people interested in this new database technology for LDAP directory data.

The material is tight and to the point and very compelling! We are very excited about the combination of OpenLDAP and MySQL Cluster! For the larger deployments, this integrates a solution that addresses the scaling, replication, and cost issues in a new and very innovative way.

Watch here, the Symas Home Page, and for emails from MySQL for more information about the webinar! Better yet, REGISTER FOR THE WEBINAR HERE!

The title of the article is “What’s Behind Microsoft’s Bond Offering?“. We don’t know.

Any rumors that they were making a cash offer for Symas are pure speculation!

Howard came up to NoCal for a couple of days. He arrived at 5:00AM Wednesday and was gone at midnight on Thursday after a couple of important meetings.

We met with Veracode and our anonymous customer (see this blog entry) and sorted out what went wrong and led to Howard’s reaction. We’re committed to working with Veracode to put OpenLDAP through their Open Source Software process and they’re committed to giving our customer the high rating his work deserves and all is well. They even bought the beer! So they’re not all bad

Then Howard had his annual MySQL Conference OpenLDAP Driver for MySQL Cluster presentation. After a little gratuitous (and popular) fiddle playing, he went through the latest slides to 40 or so folks, a lot for a talk on the last day of the conference. We were all quite pleased with the turnout and the interest in the room. It was quite a satisfying trip. More about the driver at the Symas Web site. It is really cool stuff!

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Well, we speculated and wondered during the IBM Sun acquisition rumors and then settled back into our happy rut after that died down. Now that Oracle and Sun have announced a Definitive agreement, things look a little more serious. And what does this mean for Symas?

Well, Oracle bought Sleepycat Berkeley Database (BDB) quite a while ago. There was much concern among the community about the future of BDB and its relationship with OpenLDAP. There have been a couple of minor speed bumps but, in general, we think BDB is pretty much on the track they were on before the acquisition and the OpenLDAP team is still happy with BDB as its primary database technology for most deployments. So, if that’s a clue, we expect Oracle will make a number of adjustments but will find MySQL Cluster an interesting addition to its Open Source Software offerings. We’re hopeful that this move is as neutral to positive as the last one was.

Last week was pretty busy for me; I was not only presenting a talk at the UKUUG conference in London but also a set of talks with Linagora in Paris. Of course, we at Symas are always happy to talk about OpenLDAP and I enjoy the opportunity to meet with users face to face. Visiting such picturesque cities as London and Paris is also a plus. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently one of our customers forwarded a code analysis report from Veracode to us. The report covered Symas OpenLDAP 2.4.12.1 installed on a RHEL4 system, and included a lot of noise about code outside the Symas OpenLDAP package. Our customer was interested in any action we would take to correct the “flaws” indicated in the report.

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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?)
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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.

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