Apr 19·edited Apr 19Liked by Bradford Morgan White
“This version brought NetWare Directory Services to the market in direct competition with Microsoft Active Directory.” – well, this is true if you have a time machine :) NetWare 4 was released in 1993, some seven years before Active Directory. Indeed, some clever Novell engineers figured out how to use NDS as a backend for the NT Security Accounts Manager (SAM) database, allowing NT domains (which until Active Directory were flat in structure) to take advantage of the hierarchical and distributed nature of NDS. Microsoft wasn’t too pleased with this by all reports.
Clearly, Active Directory won in the end, but whether this is due to engineering brilliance or Microsoft leveraging one monopoly to create another, I’ll leave it to the reader to decide.
Side note: in 2002 I started developing a plug compatible Active Directory replacement, XAD. I was able to leverage open source software such as OpenLDAP, Kerberos, DCE RPC and Samba 3 (for its file service; the domain controller implementation was written from scratch), but it still took me about five years to complete.
XAD was acquired by Novell in 2007, renamed to Domain Services for Windows (DSfW) and, after some herculean efforts on the part of myself and Novell’s engineering team, was integrated with eDirectory (née NDS) and Open Enterprise Server (OES). Most of the Active Directory ‘personality’ lived on top of eDirectory but there was some deep integration in the core, for example to ensure that a user created over the native eDirectory protocols would still be assigned a NT Security Identifier (SID) when in DSfW mode. Recall this was done before Microsoft published any of the protocol documentation so, it involved quite a lot of protocol analysis.
DSfW I think is still part of OES but, Samba 4 will have long eclipsed it in functionality and bug-for-bug compatibility with Active Directory. I’m still proud of what we did and the great team at Novell in Provo and Bangalore. Most of the extensions to MIT Kerberos and DCE RPC were released as open source, which then found their way into Samba and macOS (respectively).
“This version brought NetWare Directory Services to the market in direct competition with Microsoft Active Directory.” – well, this is true if you have a time machine :) NetWare 4 was released in 1993, some seven years before Active Directory. Indeed, some clever Novell engineers figured out how to use NDS as a backend for the NT Security Accounts Manager (SAM) database, allowing NT domains (which until Active Directory were flat in structure) to take advantage of the hierarchical and distributed nature of NDS. Microsoft wasn’t too pleased with this by all reports.
Clearly, Active Directory won in the end, but whether this is due to engineering brilliance or Microsoft leveraging one monopoly to create another, I’ll leave it to the reader to decide.
Side note: in 2002 I started developing a plug compatible Active Directory replacement, XAD. I was able to leverage open source software such as OpenLDAP, Kerberos, DCE RPC and Samba 3 (for its file service; the domain controller implementation was written from scratch), but it still took me about five years to complete.
XAD was acquired by Novell in 2007, renamed to Domain Services for Windows (DSfW) and, after some herculean efforts on the part of myself and Novell’s engineering team, was integrated with eDirectory (née NDS) and Open Enterprise Server (OES). Most of the Active Directory ‘personality’ lived on top of eDirectory but there was some deep integration in the core, for example to ensure that a user created over the native eDirectory protocols would still be assigned a NT Security Identifier (SID) when in DSfW mode. Recall this was done before Microsoft published any of the protocol documentation so, it involved quite a lot of protocol analysis.
DSfW I think is still part of OES but, Samba 4 will have long eclipsed it in functionality and bug-for-bug compatibility with Active Directory. I’m still proud of what we did and the great team at Novell in Provo and Bangalore. Most of the extensions to MIT Kerberos and DCE RPC were released as open source, which then found their way into Samba and macOS (respectively).