Tom Adelstein's blog

The origins of LDAP begin with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) based in Geneva. ITU began setting email standards which required a directory of names (and other information) that could be accessed across networks in a hierarchical fashion not dissimilar to DNS. The result of their work resulted in the X.500 series of standards which defined DAP (Directory Access Protocol), the protocol for accessing a networked directory service. more>>

Two years ago today, Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik confirmed the purhase of two prized enterprise products from AOL - Netscape Directory Server and Netscape Certificate Management System. He also noted than Red Hat intended to open source the products within 12 months.

Red Hat paid $25 million for the assets. You could say that was pretty good considering that in 1998, AOL paid more than $4 billion for Netscape. Matthew's purchase represented the last divestiture of Netscape's assets by AOL.

If you wander on over to the Fedora Directory Server (FDS) site you can take a look at an enhanced version of the Netscape Directory Server. This isn't your older brother's directory server. Aside from open sourcing the Netscape server, you'll find an abundance of documentation to help you learn and operate a stellar product.

In the case you have little familiarity with FDS, it has features you will not find in other open source LDAP servers. These include: more>>

Multi-master replication Hot-backups and restores Integration utility for Microsoft Active Directory users and groups A graphical management console and web available administration

I don’t like self-proclaimed prophets. So, you'll rarely see me quoting them. I guess my aversion originates in so many presentations where the next [insert application or company here] “killer

I will turn down free beer software in favor of freedom software when both exist. If you don't know the difference, that's OK. You cannot see the source code for the video drivers from ATI, for example. You can get them for free but they are not freed. The same with Adobe Acrobat Reader and plugins for the Firefox web browser. more>>

OK, we had an extended breather from our last look at BIND's zone file pri.example.org. It's time to finish up and get a sense of what these records mean.

To go off-topic a little, recently, I had the task of setting up two OpenLDAP servers and putting together a test environment for a project with several developers and several applications including some LAMP applications. Without a working knowledge of DNS, the project would have gone amuck. more>>

In this session we're going to look at a zone file listed in our named.conf file.

So let's look at pri.example.org. Notice the a CNAME and SPF files. We didn't list those in our file types in part III, but we'll demonstrate what they do in the next session. more>>

Before we take a look at a complete primary zone file, we need to cover background. Consider this background the context where the file itself is content.

Note: None of this may mean much to you until you see the entire text of a zone file. That's OK at this point because when you do see it tomorrow, you can refer back to this information to make sense of it. In the mean time, you may have to humor the editor. more>>

Yesterday, we looked at a named.conf file for a single domain we called example.org. Rather than send you back to the earlier article, we'll reproduce the file contents below: more>>

How important are Domain Name Services? Consider this, suppose you want to set up your own web site, you go to a commercial registrar and attempt to acquire a domain name. The purchasing process won't proceed unless you can enter the IP addresses or Internet names of two existing, registered DNS servers for your domain. more>>

DNS is mostly a directory service. Millions of people and computers use one or more directories every day. Currently, so many directories exist in our world that they have become almost transparent to casual observers. You could say it's a directory kind of world out there and DNS remains a big part of it for people who use the Internet regardless of the device. more>>