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Full Discussion: UNIX authentication strategy - LDAP or AD
Operating Systems AIX UNIX authentication strategy - LDAP or AD Post 302755095 by bakunin on Friday 11th of January 2013 07:13:33 PM
Old 01-11-2013
To quote from RFC1925 (The Twelve Truths of Networking):
Cheap, Fast, Reliable: pick any two, you can't have all three.
None of these tools is "easy", "cheap" or "simple": they are complex and you can easily spend a lot of money and effort to cover in production what you "saved" in development by cutting efforts. To put it bluntly: it is easy to plan poorly and save that way a neglectable amount of cost and effort just to have a nearl unworkable envirnment in production which is a pain in the ass for all. I have seen a lot of such "simple solutions" which - once they were implemented - everybody hated with a passion.

So my first advice is: do NOT plan in short terms! A centralized authenticaltion solution is a very "core" technology and you will have to live with your decisions for a very long time. Plan thoroughly and you will have a valuable addition to your data center which saves you a lot of effort in the long run. Plan poorly and you will have additional effort and work on top of what you already do.

Second: stick to (open) standards as much as possible. all the products of a single producer have faltered over time, while open standards tend to stay: compare TCP/IP (the open internet protocol) with the IPX/SPX protocol from Novell and the NetBIOS protocol from Microsoft: all three were commonly used 15 years ago. Which one was open? Which one is still there? As long as there is only a single company producing something without an independent standard behind it it will not stay in the market for any prolonged time, regardless how big the company is: IBM invented the Microchannel bus and even as it was a technically excellent solution, today IBM builds its workstations and high-end systems (pSeries) on PCI. PCI is not better than Microchannel, but it was always independent and standardized while the Microchannel was IBMs patent - it still didn't stay.

So my second advice is: use LDAP, simply because it is an open, company-independent standard. Which LDAP server you use is irrelevant, it is easy to replace one with the other. Replacing a protocol is way more difficult than replacing to server providing it. Well, in fact it is not irrelevant, but a lot less relevant than the decision about the architecture of your authentication structure.

I hope this helps.

bakunin
 

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LEARN ABOUT MOJAVE

tap::parser::result::plan5.18

TAP::Parser::Result::Plan(3pm)				 Perl Programmers Reference Guide			    TAP::Parser::Result::Plan(3pm)

NAME

       TAP::Parser::Result::Plan - Plan result token.

VERSION

       Version 3.26

DESCRIPTION

       This is a subclass of TAP::Parser::Result.  A token of this class will be returned if a plan line is encountered.

	1..1
	ok 1 - woo hooo!

       1..1 is the plan.  Gotta have a plan.

OVERRIDDEN METHODS

       Mainly listed here to shut up the pitiful screams of the pod coverage tests.  They keep me awake at night.

       o   "as_string"

       o   "raw"

   Instance Methods
       "plan"

	 if ( $result->is_plan ) {
	    print $result->plan;
	 }

       This is merely a synonym for "as_string".

       "tests_planned"

	 my $planned = $result->tests_planned;

       Returns the number of tests planned.  For example, a plan of 1..17 will cause this method to return '17'.

       "directive"

	my $directive = $plan->directive;

       If a SKIP directive is included with the plan, this method will return it.

	1..0 # SKIP: why bother?

       "has_skip"

	 if ( $result->has_skip ) { ... }

       Returns a boolean value indicating whether or not this test has a SKIP directive.

       "explanation"

	my $explanation = $plan->explanation;

       If a SKIP directive was included with the plan, this method will return the explanation, if any.

       "todo_list"

	 my $todo = $result->todo_list;
	 for ( @$todo ) {
	     ...
	 }

perl v5.18.2							    2014-01-06					    TAP::Parser::Result::Plan(3pm)
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