[Fedora-directory-users] Advantages of using FDS vs OpenLDAP?

[Mike Jackson]

Bryan wrote:
> This question is probably completely obvious to those more versed in  
> LDAP, which I am not.  And since I couldn't find an answer to this in  
> the Wiki, I thought that it didn't hurt to ask.
> 
> So what are the advantages of using a "specialized" LDAP server,  
> whether Fedora/Red Hat Directory Server, Apache Directory, Open  
> Directory, etc., versus using just OpenLDAP?  Increased  functionality?  
> Heightened and more security measures?


Fedora Directory Server was called Netscape Directory Server until just 
recently. It was the first LDAPv3 server in the world, afaik. The code 
was commercially developed and tested for ~8 years and has been in use 
in large scale deployments all over the world for a long time. It has 
contained features for many years which OpenLDAP project is just now 
considering, e.g. multi-master replication, ability to alter the 
configuration of the running server via LDAP, in-tree access control, etc.

Fedora is not what I would call a "specialized" LDAP server, it's just a 
full-featured, standards based, general purpose, high quality LDAP 
server. OpenLDAP is, in contrast, very specialized, having a lot of 
different types of backends in the recent versions. You can do some 
really tricky stuff with OpenLDAP that you can't do with Fedora, if you 
need that sort of tricky stuff in your architecture.

And the main difference for a new person like yourself is the amount of 
available documentation. Fedora is professionally and extensively 
documented, whereas OpenLDAP documentation is very scarce and terse.


Mike

-- 
LDAP Directory Consulting - http://www.netauth.com