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I'll be honest: while LDAP does what I need it to, and is the only tool I've found that works well for my purposes, this is why I'm constantly looking for another option. Just about every request for help I see come across this list gets an initial response of "Oh, well, you're one or two minor versions out of date. You need to update to the newest version before we can help you."
Software that unstable is not, in my view, really suited to a production environment. If the OpenLDAP developers -- who, overall, do an excellent job -- can't come up with a stable release every six months or so, there's a problem. If there are so many major flaws that running a month old version means it's unsupportable, that's an even bigger problem.
I've been following the list for around a year, and I understand the difficulties involved in supporting old versions, but the simple fact is, most of us don't have time to custom compile all our server software. My Ubuntu-default installs of Apache, postfix, SSH, and just about everything else work fine and can be supported by their developers. It's only LDAP (and a few things in beta) that absolutely have to run the newest version at all times. I chose to accept a limited feature-set and bullied GnuTLS into working "well enough" for our limited LDAP environment, but if I ever find an alternative, I'll be moving away from LDAP to whatever that is.
And please -- nobody take this as an attack. I really do respect the OpenLDAP development team, and the people on this list do their best to help everyone, even those of us using old versions. I just question the long-term viability of a system that needs to be recompiled as often as OpenLDAP seems to.
- -Alex McKenzie
Quanah Gibson-Mount wrote:
--On Tuesday, March 16, 2010 7:21 PM -0300 Matheus Morais matheus.morais@gmail.com wrote:
Well, IMHO this is a really bad excuse and I was not expecting to hear that in this list.
Klements,
You can get slapd source packages and change the flags as you want. Serious distribution packages as Debian packages shouldn't be discouraged by OpenLDAP dev team as I'm seeing here. Debian packages policy are very strong and help a lot stable environments to be bug-free from recent less stable versions. I use Debian as a protection from that too early versions who can potentially threat my production environment and I was very successful with Debian packages in this attempt.
You can also look for support on Debian IRC channels and lists.
Hi Matheus,
I'll note that article was written by one of the Debian openldap package maintainers. And it is quite correct that anyone wanting to run a *stable* OpenLDAP production environment should most definitely *not* use the ones provided by most Linux OS providers, *particularly* Debian/Ubuntu. The reasons why this is the case have been hashed over many, many times. Particularly, the use of GnuTLS which is horribly broken being one of the major reasons. The fact that they are not kept up to date with current stable releases is another.
--Quanah
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Quanah Gibson-Mount Principal Software Engineer Zimbra, Inc
Zimbra :: the leader in open source messaging and collaboration