Thought for the day: Always follow the path that maintains
one's level of motivation and momentum.
For all of those who have asked about how
things
are
at
TurboLinux, the simple answer is as busy as ever, with an
added bit of focus. The industry and the markets always help
on focusing a company as well as the individual.
Onto more important things...
I'm still floundering on one bit. LDAP makes
for
a
great
top-down heirarchically controlled directory service with
centralized control. However, there is a lot of fore-thought
required, and seeding an ldap server for an organization is
daunting. Its even more daunting to figure out how to seed a
low leaf among multiple ldap servers (say a workgroup
server). The only effective bottom-to-mid upward solution to
date has been Netinfo, which lets the local cluster define
domains and then one can tie them together after the fact.
For a NOS -- management tools are key, but you have to be
able to aptly manage your local data. Otherwise you end up
with complex tools to manage impossibly complex data. One
can only hope for an extremely high degree of centralization
in an organization to limit this problem.
My feelings (which to a degree have been
related
to
Luke
Howard -- lukeh here), are that maybe a combination of the
two is necessary. The equivalent un*x workstation/server
mayhap needs an improved, secure Netinfo style
authentication and management system, with adapters and
tie-ins into higher level LDAP directory services. Agents
must exist to help propogate loosely managed info into the
larger centrally controlled LDAP DSes, and likewise global
sentings can by profile be approved into the local realms of
the clusters.
This could get ugly. But unless the end user
or
group
manager can effectively manage his applications and data,
directory services are a large undertaking that can quickly
become a hindrance and would be summarily dropped.
What do you think? You can email myself as
always
with
your
ideas.
I'm also hoping to apply these a bit more back
at
Stanford. Should get more involved in my co-authored Linux
distribution, SULINUX
. I've wondered off from that for quite a bit...