On Saturday 31 January 2004 14:40, Damian O'Hara wrote:
steve-ss wrote:
Anyway, both NIS and NIS+ are strongly OBSOLETE at present.
Oh no. I don't want to run an obsolete network. Should I change to ldap? Now? SuSE-9.1. . . ? How easy is it to swap over from nis? Can I keep my old nis maps? Steve.
Take it easy Steve,
NIS is about as obsolete as UNIX was proclaimed to be when Win2K came out. I know of at least two multi-billion dollar high tech companies who use it extensively and who have no plans to go to LDAP for account services. LDAP can be a PITA to administer unless you have a good understanding the right tools/access. When it grows up a bit more I'll revisit it (I note that SuSE use it in their enterprise products).
I can also guarantee that NIS servers run better under Linux than under Solaris or HP-UX under a mixed environment. Pure agony behind that particular experience!
Damian
It's been a couple years since I worked directly in this area, but I've tried to keep my ear to the ground. Bear in mind that LDAP, strictly speaking, is a _P_rotocal, not a database specification. LDAP and NIS can work together. This really is a 'directory services' discussion. As such, the LDAP implementations I'm familiar with have certain limitations which I found restrictive. I would have to really focus on the topic to explain what the details are, but I believe a more generalized object oriented database approach would be more effective in achieving maximum flexibility in this area. The wall I hit time and time again is the lack of good UI. Some people are very gifted at working with purely textual interfaces. I can survive in such an environment, but certainly benefit from having intuitive GUI tools at my disposal. The building block are all over the place. I was just watching the Mozilla CVS source update scroll by and saw the directory SDK listed. That does have pretty good SSL support, and is the creation of the originators and first implementors of LDAP. Curses and more curses for the Mozilla project neglecting Java integration! It would be very nice to be able to exploit Gecko while working with purely java code. I can write C++, and I've done a fair bit of JavaScript hacking, but I am by far most productive with Java. I'm currently playing with http://www.schatten.info/software/xindice_browser/xindice_browser.html which looks like a good starting point to get into Xindice programming. I believe there may be real potential in XMLDB with respect to the foregoing discussion on directory services. I have to get a bit deeper into the subject before I form more solid opinions, however. STH