Symas Blog

Ever since Oracle announced its intent to acquire Sun Microsystems we’ve seen an uptick in the steady flow of sites replacing SunONE/JSDS with OpenLDAP, but is the acquisition going to result in a mass exodus from Oracle’s own directory server offering as well? If this posting is, as these things often are, only the tip of the iceberg, maybe so. At the very least it’s a good indicator of how easy the transition to OpenLDAP would be.

I’ve also been wondering what Oracle is going to do with Sun’s somewhat-long-in-the-tooth LDAP offering… Personally I wouldn’t want to have to buy more hardware and shell out additional licensing costs to run Oracle’s offering. Time will tell.

New Models Hit Retail Shelves Featuring Symas OpenLDAP

RIDGEFIELD PARK, N. .J., April 1, 2010 – Samsung Electronics America, Inc., a market leader and award-winning innovator in consumer electronics, today unveiled new intelligent refrigerators as part of its expanding kitchen line. The RF268ABBP features one of the industry’s most advanced automated inventory tracking systems, designed to help consumers save time and optimize their eating and grocery shopping. Additional products announced include feature-rich over-the-range microwave ovens and an energy-efficient dishwasher.

“This year we are introducing a number of innovative products to our expanding kitchen line that exemplify what Samsung appliances stand for: helping our consumers in their everyday lives, offer best-in-class value and address common issues,” said James Politeski, vice president of Home Appliance sales and marketing at Samsung Electronics America. “From our highly rated over-the-range microwave ovens, to our energy-efficient dishwashers, our products go beyond their given tasks and offer solutions to the consumer. Our new refrigerators save consumers time by offering instantaneous up-to-the-second reporting on their contents, purchase dates, and freshness. With their always-on networking shoppers no longer have to worry about forgetting their shopping lists at home, they can just check their refrigerator contents while they’re at the store, or be automatically reminded to go to the store before they leave their office.”

“Samsung appliances offer best-in-class power efficiency, and Symas OpenLDAP delivers best-in-class software efficiency and reliability. SAMSUNG needed a compact, trouble-free data engine to back their innovative content tracker and Symas’ professionally built OpenLDAP offering was a natural fit to their needs”, said Howard Chu, Chief Technology Officer at Symas Corporation. “Symas has extensive experience porting to diverse environments, and  building on our previous experience working with ARM processors, we are uniquely qualified to tailor a solution for the controllers embedded in these appliances.”

RF268ABBP French Door Refrigerator

Samsung French door refrigerators have all the space and storage you need for everything you bring home from the supermarket. That includes large platters, leftovers from big dinner parties, drinks and desserts. And our unique cooling innovations like Twin Cooling Plus System® and Power Freeze/Cool keep it all fresh and delicious for days on end. Craving more conveniences for your extra busy life? With Samsung French door refrigerators you’re always satisfied.

For incredible convenience in active lifestyles, the RF268ABBP features a 7-axis optical scanner to automatically identify groceries as they’re placed inside. The refrigerator inventory is published through WiFi and Bluetooth networks, so consumers can see “what’s in the fridge?” without opening the door to look inside, thus offering huge savings in power consumption. The RF268ABBP with intelligent inventory monitoring is available now in stainless for $999.99 and white and black for $899.99.

Samsung Electronics America’s press releases, video content and product images are available at .

About Samsung Electronics America, Inc.
Headquartered in Ridgefield Park, NJ, Samsung Electronics America, Inc. (SEA), a wholly owned subsidiary of Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., markets a broad range of award-winning, digital consumer electronics and home appliance products, including HDTVs, home theater systems, MP3 players, digital imaging products, refrigerators and washing machines. A recognized innovation leader in consumer electronics design and technology, Samsung is the HDTV market leader in the U.S. Please visit www.samsung.com for more information.

About Symas Corp.
Symas is the leader in enterprise directory technology and the most prolific contributor to the open source project OpenLDAP. Symas has partnered with other industry leaders to market its OpenLDAP-in-a-box, offering customers faster deployment, easier paths to upgrades and rapid bug fixes. More information about Symas is available at www.symas.com.

In a Computerworld Article that got SlashDotted we learn “Microsoft’s own superstar developers espoused their loyalty to old-school methods of coding software” at the recent Microsoft Professional Developer’s Conference . Or rather, maybe, we find out they know what we at Symas knew all along.

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Well, (with a little help from the Jackson Shaw in the Blogosphere), we got the word on Microsoft’s latest de-standardization move in Directories: the Next Generation Active Directory or (NGAD) “Clip On” for Active Directory. We at Symas don’t go to the Microsoft Professional Developer’s Conference so we missed it. Probably just as well as we would have been tempted to either laugh in all the wrong places or ask embarrassing questions.

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This has been in progress for quite a long time, but this week I published a first draft for a new proposed standard schema for storing Kerberos KDC database info in LDAP. In fact, Simo Sorce from the Samba Team and I first started discussing this over a year ago at a Samba CIFS conference, but the necessary groundwork wasn’t done until this summer. With the publishing of the KDC Information Model document in July we were finally able to proceed. Of course, Heimdal users have been running their KDCs on top of OpenLDAP for years, and we’ve included this functionality in the Symas binary packages for several years as well. But the Heimdal approach was never formally standardized, and now that MIT Kerberos has added LDAP support, and has taken a different tack on their implementation, it’s time to step in and define a schema design that everyone can agree on, and that makes best use of the LDAP data model. With our decades of experience in both Kerberos and LDAP implementation, Symas is uniquely qualified to drive this work forward.

Mathiaz Gug of Canonical (one of the Ubuntu guys!) put up a great summary of LDAPCon 2009 on his blog.

We’re starting to see feedback from the LDAPCon scattered around the web; all of the sessions were well received and provided a lot of great information. But not all of the important activity happens in the formal sessions; a lot gets done informally much later, after a few rounds of folks’ favorite beverages have been consumed. This year was no different.

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I am glad I decided to go after all. Family and community pressures almost kept me at home but I was able to be at LDAPCon 2009 for all but the very last session (sorry, Ludo!). It was a great event. I think we were all delighted that so many movers and shakers came together. After an uncharacteristically quiet first few minutes, the room lit up and it was among the most concentrated group of contributors of all types I’ve been in in many years. I’m hoping that lots of the attendees will blog about the convention and give us all lots of different views.

Most of the papers and slides are posted on the LDAPCon 2009 Web site linked off the pages for each speaker … Marty

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‘Way back in March I read about the Always Innovating TouchBook. It’s an ARM-based tablet computer with a dockable keyboard/base, running a Linux-based OS. It seemed pretty cool, and I decided to pre-order one. Over the intervening months in between projects here at Symas I looked in from time to time to see what the delivery schedule was shaping up like. A couple weeks ago I got an email announcing that my order had been shipped. It arrived last week, and I spent that weekend tinkering with it to see what it could do.

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We’ve talked about Growing the Community and the virtue of Cooperation over Competition before. I just wanted to take a moment to reflect on how we’re doing. The upcoming LDAPCon provides a perfect opportunity to illustrate the point.

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