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Re: OpenLDAP - versioning/stability questions
Craig White wrote:
I can tell you for sure that installing openldap (and other required
dependencies) from source wasn't that hard to accomplish and thus,
building on RHEL 3 or 4 or some other Linux/Unix system is far less of a
factor than you fear and it can be done without breaking any of the
other software on the system.
Oh, I realize that. I've run at least a dozen versions of OpenLDAP
at various points - even backported some limited sasl-regexp-like
patches to the 2.0 series to make it work with some servers we were
running.
But if you multiply the effort required to keep on compiling from
source, deploying, recompiling, patching, etc. times the number of
enterprise applications we use (DHCP, DNS, HTTPd, etc.) you get a
number that vastly exceeds the labor supply in a small college
systems staff.
So before deploying anything like OpenLDAP my goal it to see how
little we can *reasonably* get away with doing to care for it and
feed it.
If there's nothing that we can reasonably do to reduce the care
and feeding expenses, then so be it.
Incidentally, for small IT shops the real challenge isn't bringing
new services up. Honestly. Most people think that the cool and
the new is the real challenge. But in truth it's easy to find a
lot of smart people who are interested in (and capable of getting
running) the cool and the new. The hard part is cleaning up after
them, or forcing them to hand things off in such a way that dumber
or busier people can maintain what they've set up.
With OpenLDAP my goal is to see what's possible here.
I'm entirely convinced (after my work with 2.2.23, setting up
scripts to automate archiving and recovery of bdb back ends, and
getting our current provisioning scripts running with it) that
it is a very cool piece of software, by the way. I'm *extremely*
pleased with what I'm seeing in my own testing.
--
Richard Goerwitz richard@Goerwitz.COM
tel: 507 645 7015