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Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2006 20:37:14 -0500
From: Alex Karasulu <aok123@bellsouth.net>
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To: Apache Directory Developers List <dev@directory.apache.org>
Subject: Re: Apache Directory Sync ?
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David Boreham wrote:
> 
> I wish that there were an open source, expandable, LDAP
> sync engine. Something like a meta directory product is
> what I'm thinking of (MS has one, so do Novell and
> Sun although theirs are not actively marketed). There are
> a few other commercial products in this space too.
> AFAIK nothing like this exists in open-source-land.
> 
> Problems such a thing would be good for solving :
> 
> 1. Some user data is in some old crusty data store (Exchange 5.5,
> Windows NT4 domain controller, Peoplesoft...).
> We want to sync some subset of schema to/from the
> corporate LDAP service. Often the 'crusty data store'
> is something so strange that it only exists at one
> customer, and so custom code needs to be written to access it.
> 
> 3. Customer has Active Directory (hard to avoid, even
> I have one!). But they really want to use a nice open
> source LDAP directory server. What to do : some
> DS'es have native Windows sync solutions, but not all
> (not Apache DS nor OpenLDAP).
> 
> 3. Federation of LDAP services (for DS products that
> do not have native federation, which is almost all of them).
> Company A does business with company B, they want
> some subset of their directory data sync'ed in two directions.
> This can't be done with replication, even if the two orgs use
> the same DS product, because replication implies too much
> common administration for two distinct organizations.
> 
> The thing I have in mind would have a pluggable connector
> architecture. It would have a general purpose module for
> correlating entries/records between sources. It would be able
> to abstract all the different client sync mechanisms that
> the different DS'es support (DirSync for Active Directory,
> persistent search for FDS, syncrepl for OL, etc).
> 
> Java seems like a good implementation language given
> the lack of a high performance requirement for the task,
> and the ease with which plugins can be deployed cross platform
> (and also good database connectivity).
> 
> Thoughts ?

I'm very interested in doing what you mentioned in various degrees here
at the ASF.  I'll try to go into each in greater detail in a week.

> Anyone interested in working on such a thing ?

I'm certainly interested in working on such projects.  Perhaps we can
start by merging some of your work on the NT4 domains as well.


Thanks,
Alex