Directory Server rides again

On June 1, Red Hat announced the availability of RHDS (Red Hat Directory Server). The Linux community has had solid LDAP servers for years, such as the OpenLDAP project, but these servers haven’t been particularly easy to manage. If you wanted simpler management, you could turn to Microsoft’s LDAP-derived Active Directory, but what you’d gain in ease you’d lose in transparency. Red Hat’s newest offering aims to provide both.

Built on the foundation of Netscape’s Directory Server, which was acquired by Red Hat last year, RHDS brings much-needed features to the open source directory server landscape. Supporting LDAPv2 and LDAPv3 and providing out-of-the-box support for HP-UX 11i, Solaris 9, and, of course, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and 4, RHDS is no mere rebranding of the original product. In fact, Red Hat claims this version provides a 50 percent boost in write performance over the previous release of Netscape Directory Server.

Other key features include full support for symmetric multiprocessing, data partitioning across several servers, four-way multimaster replication via LDAPv3, replication cascading, extensible schema, and bidirectional password synchronization with Windows 2000 Active Directory and Windows NT Security Accounts Manager. Also nice to see is an SDK that eases the development of LDAP-enabled applications.

How does it look? RHDS’s Netscape roots are definitely showing, and the overall solution is much more visceral than Active Directory. You don’t need to know LDAP inside and out to work with RHDS, but you do need to know more than you might when working with Active Directory. Of course, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Watch for my complete evaluation in the coming weeks.

Red Hat Directory Server 7.1

Red Hat
Cost: $15,000 per server per year
Availability: Now