More than two weeks without an update...

The thin client project is progressing quite well, though we run into some unforeseen problems almost each and every day. For example, configuring Identity Synchronization in a Sun Cluster environment was a bit more challenging task than we hoped. The software is built around a message queue that is used to synchronize user objects between a Sun Java Directory Server and a Windows Active Directory. Components connect or plug into the directory sources and send events through the message queue everytime a new user object is created or an attribute/password is modified for an existing object.

In our setup the Sun directory was already installed on a Sun Cluster and it turned out that IdSync doesn't support the HA environment. There is a cluster agent for the Message Queue component, but we had no luck in getting it to work with IdSync: we couldn't add the startup arguments that IdSync uses to the HA agent.

So we installed Message Queue on both nodes of the cluster, installed IdSync on the node that the LDAP server was running on, and got it to work on this particular node. The LDAP server is installed on both nodes and uses shared disk to store the data. IdSync installed itself into the shared directory. We replicated the configuration of the message queue (/etc/imq/*, /var/imq/*) and the IdSync startup script (/etc/init.d/isw - the software is on shared disk, the configuration data is stored in LDAP, so no other files needed to be copied). Now we could start IdSync on any cluster node the directory server is running on. Right now I'm waiting for one of our cluster gurus to finish the configuration by writing a GDS script and adding the idsync resource to the ldap resource group.