This note captured an oft-expressed opinion, and I am posting here because it may be of some interest to a larger community.
Date: Mon, 18 Apr 2005 17:40:14 -0400From: Jason YoungTo: ndstech@lists.ncsu.eduSubject: DS, schemas, etc. Novell's beta announcement of yet another DS version prompts me again towrite, just briefly, something that I've felt was a blinding glimpse of theobvious for some time, and just offer again the observation that Novell'sdevelopment model does not fit with the way this campus works with NovellDirectory Services. I'm not sure that Novell's development model fits withany organization's way of working with NDS, but it seems a lot closer toshops that have a lot more control over the entire NDS Tree and can movefaster or at least less "fitfully" than we are able to. We have been over-paranoid about the "schema" for quite some time. And wehave the very real threat of DS problems in one section of the treecascading into serious issues in other parts of the tree. Novell does release fixes, in odd ways only eclipsed in their oddity by theLinux community (which is still better than Microsoft, and at least oneknows about them beforehand compared to Apple), but it's not like you cantake advantage of them, because you can't make changes to our shared treewithout (rightfully) sending 10 or so emails, and taking it to committee,and at least a few meetings, only to inevitably get thrown out the windowsome percentage of the time due to human error, be it ours or Novell's. The Novell tree has been embroiled in politics - some quite serious - foryears now. All surrounding this shared management issue that it seems wecling to in the interest of - well I don't know why we cling to it otherthan the "Accounts" that exist in one part of the tree or the other (it'sreally "Resources" - but the basis of access to those Resources is theAccounts). I'd offer, again, in a way that's probably going to be taken wrong (again),that it seems for this observer that we'd really be better off withindependently managed shrubbery. And the collective brainpower that existsin NDSTech, which is formidable, would seem to me to be far better usedtrying to collectively find ways to make account synchronization workacross the shrubs (you know, I think CHASS has already done this a fewtimes over). It seems that has the greatest potential of freeing up eachorganization to pursue fixes and patches and updates and innovation totheir heart's content, all the while leaning on the experiences of theirpeers across campus. It does feel like that would be more like fighting to"do something" - "for" something - rather than against the inevitablebreakage that Novell's development model seems to cause for for the NDSTree. Take it or leave it, that's my annual $1.02, having been part of ndstechsince its inception, its first chair, and interested, hopefully objective,if not unbiased, observer for several years hence. Jason --~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Jason Young NC STATE UNIVERSITYITECS Systems Group Manager COLLEGE OF ENGINEERINGhttp://people.engr.ncsu.edu/jayoung ____________________________________________________________