[ydl-gen] Help for a newbie

[ps]

On 29 Oct 2008, at 9:58 PM, pocatellomac at cableone.net wrote:

> Hello
>
> My name is Erick I'm the system admin for two Mac based labs at  
> Idaho State University.  We are currently running an open
> directory server off of Panther server.  We upgraded to leopard  
> clients and open directory doesn't work that well.  I'm thinking of
> migrating our server to Yellow dog linux, but need to know if you  
> can serve Macs and open directory from Linux.  Has anyone
> done this.  My machine is a Dual dual core 2.5 Ghz G5 with 8GB of  
> RAM and 2 TB of storage.
>
> Any Suggestions?
>
> Erick

Hi Erick,

While running YDL is possible on the machine you specify I think it  
might be more problematic replicating Open Directory in an LDAP  
database.  My feeling is that you'd be able to get some of the basic  
schema and authentication down, but to what degree of functionality, I  
don't know.   I'd check out the Open LDAP community for more leads in  
that area, and possibly even afp548.com and macenterprise.org.

You mention upgrading your clients to Leopard, but not the server.   
Panther's OD is largely dependent on the gone-from-Leopard NetInfo  
schema.  Leopard has completely ditched NetInfo*.   Tiger clients are  
more or less fine with a Panther server, but if you have Leopard  
clients you will save yourself a bunch of headaches by upgrading to  
Leopard Server.  Leopard server can authenticate older clients, but  
the opposite, as you illustrate, doesn't do so well.  Perhaps this  
would be a more direct and faster method?

*For a good article on this, see:
http://www.afp548.com/article.php?story=LeopardServerReview-LocalDirectory&query=netinfo

cheers
:peter