Directory Server Dons a Red Hat

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Last fall, Red Hat, the dominant commercial Linux distributor, acquired some server products from Time Warner, and last week at the Red Hat Summit in New Orleans, Red Hat Directory Server, the first release by the company of those Netscape-derived products, made its debut. RHDS was arguably the star of the show--unless you count Wil Wheaton, the nerdy actor from Star Trek, The Next Generation, who in real life has become a hard-core advocate for open source and who was also at the Red Hat Summit last week.

The RHDS saga begins in September 2004, when Red Hat paid $23.5 million to buy the rights to the source code for two components of the former Netscape Enterprise Server suite from the Netscape Security Solutions division of the America Online unit of Time Warner. Specifically, Red Hat acquired two products--the Netscape Directory Server and the Netscape Certificate Management Server. These two products have a decade-long history, and have been passed from company to company since Netscape through in the towel in November 1998 to be acquired by America Online for $4.2 billion. As part of that deal, Sun Microsystems and AOL agreed to sell and support the Netscape server products, which included a Web server and various other pieces of middleware. Sun paid AOL $500 million for systems and services to run the Netscape products on its own site, and Sun bought $350 million in advertising, so the net Netscape money from Sun to AOL was $150 million. Sun and AOL sold the Netscape servers as part of its iPlanet partnership, which Sun absorbed in October 2001. Sun was able to get its hands on the Netscape software because AOL had started hemorrhaging in the wake of the dot-com bubble bursting. In January 2000, AOL paid $182 billion in stock to acquire Time Warner, and the Netscape software was the least of its worries, which is why it never attained the market penetration that was possible. While Sun has used the Netscape servers as the basis of its Java Enterprise System middleware suite for Solaris, Linux, HP-UX, and Windows (the latter two just being added last fall), AOL-Time Warner had retained the rights to Netscape Directory Server and Netscape Certificate Management Server, which is how Red Hat could get its hands on them.

Red Hat had promised to get versions of these software products out the door within six to 12 months, and has made good on that promise by getting RHDS and its complementary open source version, Fedora Directory Server, out the door. Red Hat said at the summit in New Orleans that it would get other products based on the Netscape products out the door "in the coming months."

Red Hat already supports the OpenLDAP directory server and is a contributor to this project, but RHDS is aimed at higher-end users. There are myriad directory servers, which have the basic job of controlling access to network resources (such as files, databases, or network services such as access to peripherals). The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is an amalgam of the old X.500 directory services standard for Unix systems from the 1980s and the TCP/IP protocol, which it uses as a data communications transport. (Netscape programmers were the key developers behind LDAP, in addition to other contributors.) Windows uses Active Directory, NetWare uses eDirectory (formerly Novell Directory Services, which is also supported on Windows, Unix, and other platforms and which was going to save Novell's cookies before it caught the Linux bug). eDirectory is a real product with real value, and Red Hat needs something to counter it.

Most systems today use one or another form of LDAP protocol, and RHDS is no different. What is different is that Red Hat can take the Netscape Directory Server, create the Fedora Directory Server community, and largely steer how this implementation of LDAP changes over time. Red Hat cannot control the OpenLDAP project, and while Red Hat has not said so, it may not be happy with the speed at which OpenLDAP is evolving, the direction it is taking, and the length of time each release is supported. OpenLDAP 2.0 came out in August 2000 and is no longer maintained; OpenLDAP 2.1 came out in June 2002 and is no longer actively maintained. OpenLDAP 2.2 is the current release, and it came out in December 2003. The beta for OpenLDAP 2.3, which is characterized as a minor release, came out in March of this year, and 2.3 release is scheduled for the third quarter. The next major version of OpenLDAP, version 3, has this note: Date to be determined. And as for features, the project's only comment is "We're not thinking that far ahead right now." That is a perfectly honest and human response, but not an attitude that corporate software makers and buyers are going to be comfortable with.

There may be some feature and performance issues that Red Hat is trying to address as well. RHDS supports LDAPv2 and LDAPv3 operations, many of the LDAP-related Requests for Comment (RFC) from the Internet Engineering Task Force, LDAP search filters, and LDAPv3 intelligent referrals, which let one directory server query another directory server. Red Hat says that RHDS can handle millions of entries and process thousands of queries per second, and scales linearly on SMP systems as processors are added to the server that is running the program, and has performance tweaks that improve the write speed of the server by 50 percent compared to the original Netscape product.

So, that's what RHDS seems to be all about.

The commercialized version of RHDS supports the 64-bit HP-UX 11i (on PA-RISC and Itanium) and 32-bit and 64-bit Solaris 9 operating systems (on both Sparc and X86/X64) and can scale to an LDAP database of 1 GB or larger in size and still deliver performance. Red Hat's own Enterprise Linux 3 and Enterprise Linux 4 versions are also supported in 32-bit mode; when 64-bit modes will be available is unclear. The software will be available in mid-June. Pricing information is not available at press time, but Red Hat has said it will offer the program under an annual subscription pricing model as it does for its other enterprise software.

The open source project that will drive future development of RHDS is, of course, the Fedora Directory Server project. The software behind RHDS is being released through the Fedora project under the GNU General Public License, and it only runs on the Fedora Core 3 implementation of Linux and Solaris 9. Red Hat is also providing a set of binary programs called the Directory Server Configuration Tools through Fedora, which it says it will release as an open source program in the near future. Red Hat does not provide tech support for programs offered through the Fedora project.

Red Hat also added that the Red Hat Global File System, which the company acquired in December 2003 when it bought Sistina Software for $31 million, will be the next piece of code released through the Fedora project. Red Hat has been selling a commercial version of this file system since July 2004.