ldap services

One of the prime requirements of any service that is added within my company is authentication.

Within my company, there are two main sources of authentication:

• Microsoft Active Directory
• Lotus Notes ldap service

Now it is possible with varying degrees of difficulty to "persuade" most tools/services to use LDAP as an authentication source. However, there are assumptions written into most of these tools that if you are seeking to use LDAP you are either using OpenLDAP (or similar) or Microsoft's Active Directory.

In some ways it is quite encouraging to see how many other people are looking to authenticate against Active Directory. In other ways, it is deeply depressing that with so many years head start, the various UNIX vendors couldn't agree upon a common naming services standard that would be an improvement upon Active Directory.

I suspect that some will point to Kerberos and LDAP themselves as collaborative triumphs, which Microsoft had to use within Active Directory itself. However, whilst those are compelling technologies, they are not themselves individually a compelling solution. Collectively, they can be induced to become a solution, but depending upon the implementor, they may not be a compelling solution.