Re: documentation (Was: ACL Problem, Insufficient access (50))

[Tony Earnshaw <tonni@barlaeus.nl>]

Jon Roberts wrote:

> Sorry to clutter the list by continuing this oft-repeated thread, but on 
> the eve of what was at least once a charitable holiday in my own 
> cultural tradition I feel the need to add 2c from my collection.

[...]

> So peace on earth, good will towards men, and perhaps we'll find a more 
> cooperative community in our stocking ;)

Can't balk at this :) More than a few thanks to the developers and other 
contributors for producing a magnificent, stable and highly flexible OSS 
product without which I probably couldn't have produced the 
multi-service, multi-server infrastructure that I employ. A dyed-in-the 
wool Red Hat person who recognizes both its strong (by far the most) and 
weak (OL, to name but a few) points, I shall probably *not* be looking 
seriously at the LDAP server it took over from Netscape for a good while 
to come.

> The MySQL community and its market are an order of magnitude or two
> larger than OpenLDAP's. For example, a search on amazon.com lists 239
> books on "MySQL", while "OpenLDAP" yields exactly 3. That includes the
> seminal "Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services" by Tim
> Howes et. al. which mentions the OpenLDAP project on all of 2 pages
> (dealing with the C API). The results also include the slender O'Reilly
> volume "LDAP System Administration", which you'll note doesn't have
> OpenLDAP in its title and was written by a Gerald Carter, who AFAIK was
> never an OpenLDAP developer, from whom I have never seen a post on this
> list, and who IMHO could have written a far more useful text than he did.

Actually, I wasn't alluding to any MySQL books; I was alluding to the 
searchable html doco that comes with the source code and is available on 
the MySQL site, as a separate package. Funnily enough (or not, as the 
case might be), RHAS4's MySQL 4.1 rpm doesn't include it. It levered me 
up from a complete MySQL nincompoop to a reasonable innodb SQL database 
administrator with no other doco whatsoever.

You mentioned Jerry Carter. He just happens (as most people doubtless 
know) to be one of the leading lights in the Samba development team. 
Samba is another example of a product without which my raison d'Ãtre 
would be hopeless (I can out-compete Windows 2k and 2.3k people with it 
in a mixed Linux/Windows shop and leave them gasping and helpless. 
Including my own Samba ldapsam OL base). However, Samba OL 
implementation/support stinks at the best and I've been impolitely 
requested to shut up commenting on this that, on the Samba list; so I 
went away from there. If you really want to find out how to eff up a 
basic OL DSA, stick to the Samba/idealx concept and doco and everything 
based on it.

I'd like to thank the OL developers and contributors for the product as 
it is at the 2.3.11 stage. It's in production together with 2.2.17, at a 
5-server RHAS4/3 site running 1150+ user LTSP, gdbm, Samba, Postfix SMTP 
and Courier maildrop/IMAP where everything (but *everything*) depends on 
the central, replicated OL DIT. Strangely enough with a 2.2.17 source 
code master (on RHAS3, stable as a rock for 18+ months, with months of 
contiguous uptime) replicating to 2 slightly more unstable RHAS4 rpm 
2.3.11 slaves (they have a habit of stopping OL spontaneously and 
unpredictably, but a cron job starts them up again). Oh, and being a Red 
Hat person who has come to stick like glue to rpms, thanks to Buchan and 
his many Mandr(ake|iva) mates for showing Red Hat how OL 2.3 ought to be 
deployed, and providing basic Red Hat rpm specs and srpms.

Just a shame that I'm the only sysadmin there who can cope with and 
implement the OL doco.

God jul og godt kjempegodt nyttÃr til alle, vrolijke en vooral rustige 
feestdagen, merry Christmas and a peaceful new year, happy 
Chanukah/Hanukkah.

--Tonni

--
Tony Earnshaw
Email: tonni@barlaeus.nl