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Re: DSEE to OpenLDAP
On Mon, 21 Mar 2011 19:44:00 +0100
Michael Ströder <michael@stroeder.com> wrote:
> Michael Smith wrote:
> > And there were a couple of attribute types (like
> > telephoneNumber and, I believe, 'manager') where I had
> > to go into the schema files and change the syntax type
>
> You should not change the schema files shipped with OpenLDAP. You
> should find another solution for sanitizing the data.
Of course not. It's a dirty business, computing.
This was largely an organizational culture issue; people had gotten
used to putting all kinds of crazy stuff in telephoneNumber, and nobody
but nobody understood that 'manager' was supposed to be a DN.
Apart from that, of course, one could have written scripts to
canonicalize telephoneNumber and maybe convert a certain number
of common names to DNs for the 'manager' attribute. But the
amount of manual cleaning-up that would have been required,
even after the scripts had done their work, would have been
prohibitive.
It was an interesting and enlightening experience. Organizations
get used to using their technology in a certain way and for
certain purposes. One they've formed their praxis around
a lax standard, it's very hard to tighten up. It feels to the
users like you're taking something away and imposing rules
for rules' sake, without any practical need.
Is this what economists mean by "path dependency"?
--
--
Michael J. Smith
mjs@smithbowen.net
http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org
http://www.cars-suck.org
http://fakesprogress.blogspot.com