Users take a shine to Fedora Directory Server 1.0

Putting on its fedora hat, Red Hat last month released the first version of its free, open-source Directory Server.

The Fedora Project is Red Hat's pure open-source arm, with all product releases and source code being freely available without the company's licensing, or "subscription" restrictions, which are required for running Red Hat's enterprise product offerings.

Fedora Directory Server 1.0 comes directly from the Netscape and iPlanet Directory Servers and provides a platform for organizing users and computing resources on a Linux-based network, or a mixed environment with Windows and Unix. The software is based on LDAPv3, and uses Apache Web server for the configuration and management interface. Other open-source packages are also included in Fedora Directory Server, such as Mozilla Network Security Services (NSS), which includes implementations of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TSL) stacks for securing data and management message transactions. Advanced password cryptography and hashing technology with Secure Hash Algorithm is also supported with support for SHA-256, SHA-385 and SHA-512.

According to Red Hat, users have been jumping on the open-source directory software bandwagon. Since The Fedora Project released a beta version of Fedora Directory Server in June, more than 50,000 downloads have been reported, the company says. After only a week of releasing Version 1.0 Red Hat reported that 10,000 downloads had occurred.