Hi
I posted a request yesterday about the LDAP auth support by Ontap .
I received very few answers ( thanks to those that respond )
I received NO answers from NetApp folks that are usually very reactives.
When we bought our F85 filer last year people at NetApp France said LDAP will be supported soon by Ontap.
THAT IS WHY we bought this filer as we are migrating ALL of our authentication process to LDAP ( NOT MS Active Directory ) for all of our workstations clients.
As many high educationnal sites we have many mixed environnement computers , HP-UX, Linux, windows9x/2000/NT, FreeBSD, Solaris ... we need to centralize authetication to LDAP to have an unique and centralized auth process for all computers.
Unfortunately Ontap for now doesn't support LDAP auth and I am stuck as our filer will centralize all users data ...
This happen BY THE FAULT of NetApp people who said Ontap WILL support LDAP auth soon ...
What am I supposed to do NOW ?????
We have a mixed Solaris/Windows environment. We went through quite a bit of research. regarding a unified name service/ authentication method. We felt it was too soon for LDAP. There are other non-LDAP tools. (Is Windows Active Directory really following LDAP standards or has Microsoft "embranced and extended" it?)
Anyway we settled on Solaris PC-NetLink (now let me say right here NetApp does not support Big Endian DC's), BUT you can use the "prefdc" option to point to a standard Windows BDC with PC-NetLink being the PDC. The is some manual transfer of account info, but in theory Unix account info can be transferred to the PDC.
Also you don't say if on the Unix side you are using NIS. If you are, Microsoft has "Services for Unix" I think its at 2.0 version that will let a Windows box be a NIS master. It has some tools for moving users accounts between name services.
I too believe LDAP is the answer, but I don't think all vendors are up to speed yet. I am keeping an eye on Sun/iPlanet (Netscape Alliance) because I think thats where Sun's support for LDAP is being developed.
. . . As many high educationnal sites we have many mixed environnement computers , HP-UX, Linux, windows9x/2000/NT, FreeBSD, Solaris ... we need to centralize authetication to LDAP to have an unique and centralized auth process for all computers. . . . Frank Bonnet
Other posters have made some interesting suggestions. One thing I've had in the back of my mind, though we haven't tried it here yet, is that Solaris-8 has some NIS-to-LDAP transition support available in it. My understanding is that you can point NIS clients at an appropriately configured Solaris-8 NIS server, which in turn answers NIS requests based on data hosted in an LDAP service.
So, even old systems like SunOS-4 and Solaris-2.6, etc., can be served from LDAP without realizing it. It seems reasonable to assume that one could do the same thing for a NetApp's NIS client as well.
There are references to this LDAP transition stuff in some Sun Blueprints Online articles (http://www.sun.com/blueprints/).
Regards,
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Frank Bonnet -
Marion Hakanson -
Walt Zapor