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Implementing Linux in Your IT Organization: Page 3 of 5


NWC Project: Linux A-List
If you're looking for the perfect Open-Source application for your data-center-centric Linux server, check out our Linux A-List, compiled and maintained with recommendations by Contributing Editor Don MacVittie.

  • Application server vendors and projects: BEA Systems, www.bea.com; Borland Software Corp., www.borland.com; Enhydra, www.enhydra.org; IBM, www.ibm.com; JBoss, www.jboss.org; Novell, www.novell.com; Oracle Corp., www.oracle.com; Sun Microsystems, www.sun.com; Sybase, www.sybase.com; Tomcat, jakarta.apache.org/tomcat
  • LDAP has been around a long time. Most application-server, EAI (enterprise application integration) and portal vendors support it. There are some excellent products, most notably Novell's eDirectory, that implement LDAP on Linux. But there's a problem with setting up a pure LDAP server: Many applications require Active Directory Services. Some support both, but anything from Microsoft will require ADS or a PDC (Primary Domain Controller); products from vendors that support only Microsoft will be the same. There are even products that run on non-Windows platforms but require ADS to work!

    Although LDAP has been characterized as difficult to set up, many commercial versions have useful interfaces to make configuration easier. Because of its roots, if you have Novell staffers in-house, LDAP will feel much like home to them given a decent user interface. There's a lot of support for LDAP in the open-source world as well, but the user interfaces for configuration and the import/export toolsets just don't measure up to those offered as "value adds" by some vendors. You can do the job with a purely open-source product, but again, make certain your staff is prepared for the work involved. That said, don't let us scare you off: Open-source projects like OpenLDAP have come a long way in the past couple of years.

  • LDAP vendors and projects: Computer Associates International, www.ca.com; IBM, www.ibm.com; Novell, www.novell.com; OpenLDAP, www.openldap.org; Oracle, www.oracle.com; Siemens, www.innosoft.com/ldap_survey/vendor/sni; Sun Microsystems, www.sun.com
  • Although many e-mail servers run on Linux, things could be better in this area. Maybe it's a marketing failure on the part of vendors, or maybe it's a support issue, but there just aren't many e-mail servers that can be managed by mere mortals. We list the commercial ones, and these work well on Linux. If you're looking to move your e-mail to Linux and your vendor is on our list, you should be good to go.

    However, if you're looking for an inexpensive, noncommercial solution, we have some bad news: Most popular open-source e-mail servers are devilishly difficult to configure--so difficult that people with computer science degrees combined with years of e-mail and Linux experience have walked away from them. Modifying rules in both Sendmail and Qmail, arguably the two most popular open-source alternatives, is tricky, and anyone who has delved into sendmail.cf can tell you it's not where your average IT person wants to be. We've heard of people spending weeks trying to modify rules for filtering and blocking.

    On the other hand, we spoke with one Fortune 1000 that's using Sendmail on an IBM AIX machine to filter out e-mail viruses and worms before mail touches a Windows computer. Judging by the slew of Windows-specific attacks over the past few years, this is a good plan, but check with your spam-filtering vendors about support and pricing before you commit to it. If you configure your own Linux-filtering machine, ensure that at your volume, you wouldn't be better off purchasing a service like Postini or SingleFin to do this for you.