Virtual Identity Dialogue

At Linux World this week we announced our preview release of Centralized Security and User Authentication Services for Linux.

You can find out even more (including the preview software) here.

The official mouthful of words aside - what this package is about is this:

1 - Simplify the setup and configuration of common authentication and security services that run on Linux (such as PAM and SAMBA) that can leverage LDAP - in particular so that it works well with Oracle Directory Services.

2 - A release of OID that can be installed using the standard RPM tool and stripped all of the non-directory services stuff (such as Oracle SSO, DAS, application server) that normally gets installed (because OID has traditionally been installed as part of Oracle Application Server infrastructure which is a combination of products).

3 - Certify OID that can run on top of Oracle Express Edition (aka OracleXE). XE is the free version of the Oracle database.

This package is a result of a combination of things:
That started when Oracle released Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) - which in turn got us to thinking about whether or not there was some niche we could fill with directory services related to OEL.

We did not just want to ship Oracle Directory Services (OID and OVD) with OEL because we didn't see how that really would help make either OEL or ODS more desirable.

So we started talking to some customers - in particular those who are running multiple Linux boxes in server farms and realized that a challenge they are facing is how to manage accounts on those multiple servers. Sure - most of those accounts are system-administrative in type though I'm sure a larger percentage than we often consider in our Web-focused world are not - the reality is that there are multiple accounts spread out over multiple machines & that is a chore to manage.

Not to mention because it's cumbersome to manage - it increases the odds of having one of those accounts being used for security violations because you can't easily disable them.

Thus we came up with a package that would simplify the configuration of PAM and SAMBA and related stuff. This in turn would be combined with a OID release that required less resources to run so that admins could easily use OID to test it out but then in turn easily migrate to the "enterprise" version if they needed to.

We think this is really going to be good news for those Linux admins who are also DBA (or support DBA) because since OID stores its data into an Oracle database - your existing data monitoring, backups, etc tools & skills can be leveraged with OID. As opposed to practically every other storage-based directory (as opposed to virtual directory :)) - which uses their own proprietary data management technology.

So if you manage (or know someone who does) 2 or more Linux boxes - I would encourage you to give this a spin and let us know what you think.