a few more questions

[Martin Konold]

Am Mittwoch, 8. September 2004 17:53 schrieb Jean-Michel Dault:

Hi,

> I don't understand why kolab insists on having user at domain.

In the future we want to have real multi-domain support. For this we must be 
able to completly seperate user1 at domain1.tld from user1 at domain2.tld. Without 
the domain part we cannot guarantee that there will be no conflicts.

> It means you 
> can't use Kolab for pam_ldap, samba, etc.

This statement is incorrect as Kolab 2 supports a seperate UID (potentially 
without a domain part) for exactly these purposes.

> The only advantage is to be able to have the same user on multiple
> domain, but since Kolab doesn't support virtual domains, it's totally
> useless.

We want at some point in the future to really support multiple domains. (Think 
about an ISP....)

> Besides, what most ISPs do these days is assign a random user, for
> example b1i8rug6, which gives 36^8 possibilities (enough for every human
> on the planet and their dog) and they let people choose their own e-mail
> and possibly aliases.

This is imho a very suboptimal solution as it requires people to memorize a 
very odd sequenze of strange letters which are not necessarily globally 
unique in order to log in.

Remembering the email address (which is guaranteed to be globally unique) is 
much more user and admin friendly.

> I have rewritten Kolab 1.0 to manage user without an @domain part, and
> made it work with Samba and pam_ldap. There will be a lot of work to
> port it to Kolab 2.0, but IMHO it's definitely the way to go.

Kolab 2 is explicitly prepared to work with samba and pam_ldap.

Last but not least more and more other organizations including Microsoft 
(sic!) are starting to use name at domain in order to separate different realms.

Regards,
-- martin

Dipl.-Phys. Martin Konold

e r f r a k o n
Erlewein, Frank, Konold & Partner - Beratende Ingenieure und Physiker
Nobelstrasse 15, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany
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email: martin.konold at erfrakon.de