Re: Netscape Roaming Profiles

["Kurt D. Zeilenga" <Kurt@OpenLDAP.org>]

At 10:33 AM 7/6/99 -0400, shaned wrote:
>> I use netscape ldap server. I've followed the instructions on
>> "Implementing Manual Roaming" from netscape's site.
>> Probably what goes wrong with openldap is what Kurt says.
>> Communicator apparently needs some kind of modification date/time
>> attribute to see if the information on the client is newer than the info
>> on the server. I suppose openldap doesn't store these attributes.
>> In my case it works perfectly.

OpenLDAP supports these operational attributes, but only sets
modification attributes upon modification (which is consistent with
historical and LDAPv3 behavior).  Netscape Navigator, from what I
gather, expects modification attributes to be set upon creation (which
is inconsistent with historical and LDAPv3 behavior).  As such, I
would presume that Netscape Navigator would have problems interoperating
with many of the available LDAP servers.

>I know this question got asked earlier (although never answered)
>but how bout putting an option like :
>
>BrokenNetscapeClient   on
>
>in slapd.conf and put in the patch for the modif time stamp?

Any server which enabled such a feature would not be able to
interoperate with clients expecting behavior per specs.
Introduction of such a feature would promote developers to
break these clients or to create new clients which only
worked with "broken" servers.

Introduction of such a feature would cause what is a
short term interoperability problem to become a long term
interoperability problem.  To solve interoperability problems,
we (as a community) must move towards agreed upon specifications.

Hence, you won't see me code or champion such a kludge.
However, as this is an open source project, others are more
than welcome to code it and champion it's integration
(on the -devel list).

>That way we could all use the roaming profiles with OpenLDAP if we
>whish. 

You can do this now by applying the patch provided in ITS#168.
However, I recommend working with the client provider to get
the client fixed.  Another option, of course, is to fix it
yourself (and provide the fix to the community).  Source for
NN is available at <URL: http://www.mozilla.org>.

>Personnaly I would use 2 slapd's, one for production (which doesnt have
>BrokenNetscapeClient on) and another for the roaming profiles.

Seems like a prudent approach... but one which users are very
unlikely to undertake.

Kurt