The Swede in the middle of Silicon Valley

Friday, March 14, 2008

Sometimes you just want to kill yourself

Yes, sometimes you want to kill yourself and take others with you in the fall.

Since I came home today I've spent a great deal of time trying to collaborate Samba, OpenLDAP and BIND to act as an Active Directory server. By history I've dealt a great deal with Active Directory servers and like the idea behind it but I've never liked the implementation.

Anyhow, as I was reading up on how AD works and how to implement it I just realized minute by minute what a horrible LDAP implementation AD is. Surely I knew this before I started off but can someone really make LDAP _this_ bad?

Anyhow, 5 hours into it I gave up, I would describe the experience as trying to touch your toes with your hands when standing up. I bet there's someone who can do it but it's simply not normal!

To move on I was going to implement IPsec (the horrible VPN protocol) on the same server, but no-no, you can't run IPsec of 1 single interface, it has to be 2. Intellegent ideas such as bridging is something completely unknown to IPsec.

So to add up:
I'm not running any windows computers so I really don't have a need of AD, just wanted to see how it could be done.
IPsec, I was planning to run this along with OpenVPN, but why bother, OpenVPN it sure as hell a much better choice all categories.

Conclusion: Proprietary and old network standards can go to hell. Long live open source and innovation!

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