Something, something, dark side.
I want to like LDAP. Every so often I do interesting things with it, and I start to think I like it, then some software that claims to support LDAP fails to do so properly and I remember I hate it again.
I guess the problem with LDAP is that most people are scared by it, unless you reach a certain level of scale you don't need it. That makes installing it out of the blue a scary prospect, and that means that lots of toy-software applications don't even consider using it until they're mature and large.
When you bolt-on support for LDAP to an existing project you have to make compromises; do you create local entries in your system for these scary-remote-LDAP-users? Do you map group members from LDAP into your own group system? ANd so on.
To be fair to the application developers if the requirements for installation were "Install LDAP" they'd probably have a damn smaller userbase, and so we cannot blame OpenLDAP, or the other servers.
All the same it is a shame.
The very next piece of software I ever write that needs to handle logins will use LDAP and only LDAP. How hard can it be?
In happier news I re-deployed http://www.debian-administration.org/ over the weekend. It now uses the Bytemark BigV platform which rocks.
The migration was supposed to be a "Christmas Project", but took longer than expected due to the number of changes I need to make to the software, and my deployment plan. Still I'm very happy with the way things are running now, and don't expect I'll need to move or make significant changes for the next nine years. I just hope there is still interest in such things then.
ObQuote: "Would you like a treatment? " - Dollhouse