Fedora Directory Server

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Fedora Directory Server
Developed by	Red Hat
Latest release	1.1.0 / 8 January 2008
OS	Linux / Unix
Genre	Directory server
License	GNU General Public License
Website	directory.fedoraproject.org

The Fedora Directory Server (FDS) is an LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) server developed by Red Hat, as part of Red Hat's community-supported Fedora Project. Fedora Directory Server is identical to the Red Hat Directory Server, just rebranded.

While FDS is freely distributable under the terms of the GPL, Red Hat is also offering a commercial version, Red Hat Directory Server, on a subscription basis. A paid subscription will include added features like customer service and technical support.

FDS is being built on top of Fedora, but supports many operating systems including Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and 4, Solaris 8 and later, and HP-UX 11i.

1 History
2 Features
3 See also
4 References
5 External links

[edit] History

FDS is the newest incarnation of what was once the original University of Michigan slapd project. In 1996, the project's developers were hired by Netscape Communications Corporation and the project became known as the Netscape Directory Server (NDS). After acquiring Netscape, AOL sold ownership of the NDS intellectual property to Sun Microsystems but retained rights akin to ownership. These rights were acquired by Red Hat, and on June 1, 2005, much of the source code was released as free software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

As of FDS version 1.0 (December 8, 2005), Red Hat released all of the remaining source code for all components included in the release package and continues to maintain them under their respective licenses.^[1] ^[2]

[edit] Features

FDS has multi-master capability. There are currently up to four writable directory masters supported with FDS.

FDS also has the ability to export parts of the directory to read-only servers. This is in contrast to Microsoft's Active Directory (pre-Windows Server 2008), where all servers currently must be read/write and changes on one server are synchronized (converged) between all the other servers via multi-master replication.

FDS has a Java-based GUI front end for administration.