On Thu, 10 Dec 2009, Edward Ned Harvey wrote: > There was a time (over a decade ago), when Novell (Netware) was > synonymous to all the things that are now synonymous with Active > Directory. That is User management, security, single sign on, etc. > But obviously the cross-platform capabilities of AD are somewhat > limited, and I wonder if there¹s a newer implementation of something > that would be a suitable alternative.
Active Directory is Microsoft's re-implementation of OSF DCE. They both still interoperate over TCP (but the MS UDP RPC stack has changed slightly). OSF DCE code is GPL, but needs maintenance. Jim Doyle did a lot of work to get it working on linux ages ago. (RH 6 or so). I occasionally work at getting it updated to more modern versions of linux. So actually, AD is potentially very cross-platform, but the unix community doesn't seem interested... The real problem is OSF DCE used posix draft 4 threads. Jim developed a draft7-draft4 compatibility library, but it has been broken by linux changes. At one point, there was no chance of it ever working because of the linux threads.h breakage, but that has since been fixed. There's actually a lot of cool stuff in DCE: An X.500 server, secure RPC over both UDP and TCP, public key extensions to Kerberos (code is based on non-free Bsafe), Episode filesystem (like DEC Advfs), etc. There is also CMA threads library (though the value of userspace threads is now pretty dubious) > If you wanted something like AD that works equally well for Windows, > Mac, and Linux (and possibly others) is that a complete unreality? I > am aware of such things as Kerberos and LDAP of course. But using > Kerb / LDAP, you couldn¹t for example easily join a Mac or Linux > laptop to a domain, login once, and expect your laptop to continue > working even after you¹ve taken it away, outside the network. > > Am I off track? Anyone care to share their experiences? > -- Av8 Internet Prepared to pay a premium for better service? www.av8.net faster, more reliable, better service 617 256 5494 _______________________________________________ bblisa mailing list [email protected] http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa
