More about Directory Server and OpenDS Margin Notes

Masood Kalali published an interview today over at DZone with Ludovic Poitou who is community lead for the OpenDS project. Masood and Ludo look at what the OpenDS project is aimed to accomplish, and why Sun moved to chose to invest effort in the the Java-based OpenDS LDAP server to build the next generation of directory services, instead of jumping on board with an existing open source project.

Pierre and Gilles have mostly rewired our central servers and labs to the new switch in Sun's Grenoble engineering center.

Here is the before picture:

And here is what it looks like now:

Why should anyone care? Well, now we have a 10Gbit backbone between labs, with 800Gbit throughput in the central switch. Pierre ran tests showing that a machine with 1Gbit Ethernet now actually can get 1Gbit throughput to a machine in another lab and network. That means we no longer have to have all equipment for a big test physically located in the same place.

That freedom is a good thing. My expectation is that we will soon be trunking 4 x 1Gbit Ethernet for some of our heavy load tests with OpenDS, for example. 

Sun engineer Matt Swift recently started blogging about noteworthy development in the core of the OpenDS code base. Worth reading...

In one entry, Matt explains how much he and fellow engineer Bo Li managed to improve response times, especially for large entries, by refactoring OpenDS ASN.1 APIs. (See New ASN1 library brings performance boost to OpenDS.) Because all LDAP messages are encoded in ASN.1, optimal ASN.1 handling makes a significant difference.

In Garbage First - the G1 garbage collector, Matt describes what has been happening between the OpenDS folks and Java engineers like Java HotSpot expert Tony Printezis, and VM wiz Laurent Daynes. In a nutshell, OpenDS is built not only to serve lots of LDAP clients very quickly, but also to serve all requests quickly. The trick is finding the way to get all the benefits of garbage collection without having LDAP clients waiting while the JVM takes out its trash. Looks like they are indeed coming up with some promising new tricks.

Thanks for taking time out to write, Matt.

Michael Ströder's web2ldap provides browser-based access to an LDAP server.

Once installed, web2ldap is simple to use. Make sure you have an LDAP URL in etc/web2ldap/web2ldapcnf/hosts.py, that points to OpenDS such as http://localhost:389 or http://localhost:1389, and start web2ldap.

As web2ldap can also discover the schema, you can use it to add and modify entries.