Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on April 29, 2006 04:23 AM
I was speaking correctly, and I wasn't speaking to other managers here (I am one, actually--yes, I am a manager who actually kept his chops). I was speaking to the hackers.
"Active Directory" actually is indeed a swear word for those who believe in freedom. That's one major reason that Red Hat bought and GPL'd Netscape Directory Server (thank goodness, too!). It's like Broadcom and Texas Instruments with their wireless chipsets; both of those names will be swear words to many of us until, like RaLink and others, they get a clue and open up their wireless chipset specs. Free Software hackers typically value freedom. I was speaking of one way for them to help make that desired freedom more prevalent. Were I a hacker myself, I'd have written one long ago.
The "Craptive Directory" is a proprietary, non-standard bastardization of LDAP+Kerberos, and other systems which actually implement standard LDAP+Kerberos do not interact well at all with it. The Samba team has gone into this in rather significant detail, since they're the ones who are working on reverse-engineering those secret tweaks.
You're right about Reading The Fine Manual (RTFM); that's how I learned, too. You're also right about needing to understand how LDAP servers work. But remember, most Windows administrators cannot handle either of these, and that's who I was talking about. To become ubiquitous in corporate America, there will need to be a GUI that's at least as easy to use as the GUI on Windows Server, and that GUI will need to handle authentication and authorization, including Samba configuration. Sadly, there aren't enough people like you and I are that can RTFM and do it at the command line. I wish that there were; we recently had positions open, and I'd have hired them!
Hopefully, Red Hat will have the resources to pull off such an easy-to-use GUI, now that they've freed the Netscape Directory Server code. I would love to see this.
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Re:Your examples are non-Free
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on April 29, 2006 04:23 AM"Active Directory" actually is indeed a swear word for those who believe in freedom. That's one major reason that Red Hat bought and GPL'd Netscape Directory Server (thank goodness, too!). It's like Broadcom and Texas Instruments with their wireless chipsets; both of those names will be swear words to many of us until, like RaLink and others, they get a clue and open up their wireless chipset specs. Free Software hackers typically value freedom. I was speaking of one way for them to help make that desired freedom more prevalent. Were I a hacker myself, I'd have written one long ago.
The "Craptive Directory" is a proprietary, non-standard bastardization of LDAP+Kerberos, and other systems which actually implement standard LDAP+Kerberos do not interact well at all with it. The Samba team has gone into this in rather significant detail, since they're the ones who are working on reverse-engineering those secret tweaks.
You're right about Reading The Fine Manual (RTFM); that's how I learned, too. You're also right about needing to understand how LDAP servers work. But remember, most Windows administrators cannot handle either of these, and that's who I was talking about. To become ubiquitous in corporate America, there will need to be a GUI that's at least as easy to use as the GUI on Windows Server, and that GUI will need to handle authentication and authorization, including Samba configuration. Sadly, there aren't enough people like you and I are that can RTFM and do it at the command line. I wish that there were; we recently had positions open, and I'd have hired them!
Hopefully, Red Hat will have the resources to pull off such an easy-to-use GUI, now that they've freed the Netscape Directory Server code. I would love to see this.
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