need organizational hint

[David Lang]

it's definantly less work to learn LDAP then to modify every program to
use something else and maintain your changes. with LDAP the software
already uses it, or if it doesn't you can add support for it and feed the
changes back to the developers who will probably thank you and add it to
the main distribution so that others maintain it going forward (remember
with your own database you will have to go through the modification
process on the new versions of the software you use as well)

LDAP is in many ways an ugly, inefficant beast created by a committe, but
it does have one significant advantage of most alturnatives, it's widly
supported by programs and as you replace people your new people are likly
to have some knowledge aobut it.

in many ways it's the same type of advantages that MS stuff has, but while
the LDAP stuff is far from perfect they definantly seem to be a lot better
then MS and you do have competition for your server software so you don't
get locked into anything.

David Lang

 On Fri, 11 Apr 2003, Etienne Goyer wrote:

> Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2003 09:28:21 -0400
> From: Etienne Goyer <etienne.goyer at linuxquebec.com>
> To: info-cyrus at andrew.cmu.edu
> Subject: Re: need organizational hint
>
> On Thu, Apr 10, 2003 at 08:59:12PM -0500, Phil Howard wrote:
> > On Thu, Apr 10, 2003 at 10:53:21AM -0400, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> >
> > | >5.  No LDAP or other network based user directory.  The user
> > | >    directory should be something simple and basic, like a DB file.
> > | >    But it will need to include the data for the user's rules,
> > | >    even if in a separate DB.
> > |
> > | So your going to basically recreate a broken version of LDAP?
> >
> > I won't be creating that which I don't want.  What I do want is
> > directly access data within minimal overhead not only for the
> > mail system to access, but also for other programs I am doing
> > to access and manage.  The email is only a part of it.  I have
> > looked at LDAP, but it adds too much complication.
>
> LDAP does exactly what you want : make information accessible by
> different system (or subsystem) with minimal overhead.
>
> You could try to coax all the system into using the same relational
> database, table and columns for the information required, but I believe
> this will end up being more headache than learning and using LDAP.
> Maybe you are put off by the LDAP lingo and loathe the learning curve,
> but I can tell you it's worth the effort to learn it.  It make a lot of
> sense when you understand it and can help solve a lot of information
> consolidation problem.  It is also becoming quite ubiquitous with the
> advent of AD and the rise in popularity of OpenLDAP in the Linux world.
>
> For your Web frontend, PHP and Perl both have very good LDAP support.
>
> The overhead is, as far as my experience goes, pretty minimal and could be
> considered insignificant if the LDAP server is running on the same
> machine as the service accessing it.
>
> Just my humble opinion.
>
> --
> Etienne Goyer                    Linux Québec Technologies Inc.
> http://www.LinuxQuebec.com       etienne.goyer at linuxquebec.com
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>