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.
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.
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.
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
‘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.
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.
Thanks to everyone who submitted proposals; the committee has selected the talks and the program for LDAPCon2009 is now online. See you at the conference!
Usually I don’t blog much about new developments in the OpenLDAP code; I figure people who are interested will just subscribe to the commit mailing list and/or the devel list and stay informed. But sometimes there’s a greater significance to certain commits that isn’t immediately obvious. For example, back in August 2008 I committed code to allow our LDAP library to work with the Mozilla NSS security library. With support already in place for OpenSSL and GnuTLS, it’s not obvious that we really needed to add Yet Another Security Library to our list. But that was a small piece of the work needed to replace Mozilla LDAP with OpenLDAP in Firefox/Thunderbird/Seamonkey, which will lead to Bigger and Better Things. Last week we committed several additions to this code, contributed by developers at Red Hat. Folks who have been paying attention to the blogs here at Symas should immediately recognize that something’s up.
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