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Re: OpenLDAP - versioning/stability questions



--On Monday, February 21, 2005 3:58 PM -0600 "Richard L. Goerwitz III" <richard@goerwitz.com> wrote:

So anyway, with regard to my original query (regarding OpenLDAP
and RedHat), my goal was to determine whether RedHat's OpenLDAP
build is solid or worth using.  Is it enterprise worthy, as you
might expect from the designation 'RedHat Enterprise Linux'?
Or are they just putting OpenLDAP out there without giving it
much effort?

I wouldn't use any version of OpenLDAP less than 2.2.23, due to a security patch applied in 2.2.23. I'll also note the version shipped with RedHat is very old, and there have been many, many bug fixes since that release. Also, RedHat's "support" of OpenLDAP has been marginal, and I doubt it will get any better as they try to get people to use the antiquated Netscape Directory Server they just purchased and will be pushing.

I'm also interested in determining whether (aside from basic
security and reliability patches) there is any particular
version of OpenLDAP expected to last, as a solid, supported
version of the product, for eighteen to twenty four months -
a typical lifecycle for a thing like a database (e.g., Oracle
8i, 9i, etc.) an OS (e.g., RHEL 3.0) etc. at an institution
of my size, with a staff like ours.  By solid/supported I am
not implying that no changes or patches would be needed.  The
issues for us are persistence of a given product revision
(e.g., 2.2 series), feature freezes, and ease of upgrades.

I would hope OpenLDAP 2.2.23 would be. OL 2.2 is feature frozen, and only has bug fixes/patches applied in subsequent releases. I've found that maintaining a set of servers on a given OL release to be trivial, simply upgrading the version of software running on my servers 'in-place', without having to do complicated things like dump & re-import my database every time.


My sense is that this group sees the RedHat build (2.2.13,
released 8 months ago) as obsolete and RedHat's use of it
questionable.

Is this correct? 

I sure do (as noted above). ;)

--Quanah

--
Quanah Gibson-Mount
Principal Software Developer
ITSS/Shared Services
Stanford University
GnuPG Public Key: http://www.stanford.edu/~quanah/pgp.html

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