Shortly after purchasing the technologies from AOL/Netscape, we opened the source for Red Hat Directory Server in the summer of 2005. Since then, the Fedora Directory Server project has attracted attention and contributions from the community and is now also at the heart of a broader community effort around the central management of identity, policy and audit for the Unix and Linux world, called freeIPA.

Today’s 8.0 release of Red Hat Directory Server is built directly from those fully open source Fedora Directory Server bits and contains all of the contributions and community effort that went into that project. Part of the effort was around achieving full RPM compliance for Red Hat Directory Server, enabling organizations to now rely on the standard Red Hat Network update process for updates.

Organizations use Red Hat Directory Server as a vital part of their infrastructure to provide authentication and authorization. A recent example is Basel University, which needed to provide reliable, authorized access for its 15,000 students and employees to university resources. The University turned to Red Hat Directory server with success.

Beyond the major features discussed above, Red Hat Directory Server 8.0 brings organizations new features in platform support, security and protocol support:

• Platform support: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5, 32 bit and 64 bit for both, HP-UX 11i (Itanium, 64-bit), and Solaris 9 SPARC 64 bit.
• Security: Enhanced password syntax policies help meet regulatory requirements. FIPS compliance is achieved using a validated NSS security module. Other security enhancements include default SELinux profile, support SHA-256, SHA-384, SHA-512 and MD5 for hashed password storage, and improved support for SASL/Kerberos.
• Protocol support: Accept incoming connections from IPv6 clients and support for IPv6 in the SDK but no support for interpreting IPv6 addresses in access control instructions or using IPv6 connections for operations such as replication and chaining.

We believe that Red Hat Directory Server 8.0 is the only robust, open-source directory server with enterprise-class support. We’re working on more developments in this area, so stay tuned for upcoming news.