title: Apache Directory Server 1.5.4 link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2009/04/29/apache-directory-server-154/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 329 created: 2009/04/29 21:21:14 created_gmt: 2009/04/29 21:21:14 comment_status: open post_name: apache-directory-server-154 status: publish post_type: post

Apache Directory Server 1.5.4

Apache Directory Server has reached a point in its development where I think it deserves some serious examination. While configuration is still a little rough, especially for features like access controls and replication (ah, and indexing or re-indexing attribute values), over the last week or so I’ve been installing and re-installing the latest release (Apache DS 1.5.4) and found its performance and stability to be very good.

Because its written entirely in Java I expected its performance to be much worse, and in fact earlier versions had some severe shortcomings. I’m not sure whether the improvement is the result of changes in the directory server itself or its JDBM backend. Or it could just be that I took the time to index the attributes I would be using in my testing.

While I’ve still got to learn how to do important configuration changes like bulk loading new schema objects (I’ve tried that once and managed to hose things up completely), I think it will be worth the effort. Like Tomcat and the Apache HTTP server, the ease with with this product can be installed on any system that has a JDK leads me to believe it could someday replace my existing directory environment.

There are still a couple of things that would keep me from deploying this in production. For example, the daemon will only run on ports 389 and/or 636 as root. In addition, documentation of things like adding attribute indexes and access controls are still extremely poor to the point of being useless.

POSTSCRIPT:

Installing Apache DS 1.5.4 is a breeze on any system. All you need to do is have JDK 1.5 or highter (I’m running 1.6.0_11 on most of my machines already). The Windows installer has a nice gui, but I really loved the line art “splash screen” for the Linux installer. On my Linux boxes the default install points were:

/opt/apacheds-1.5.4
/var/lib/apacheds-1.5.4
/var/run/apache-1.5.4
/etc/init.d/apache-1.5.4-default

The default directory instance is called “default”, and runs on port 10389.

Out of the box the “uid=admin,ou=system” root user’s password is “secret”. Changing this requires binding to the directory as that user and changing userpassword to whatever you desire.

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