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Comment by jakupovic | Hacker News Reader

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jakupovic·

Go Blue

LDAP + Kerberos == Microsoft Active Directory

This was standard at U of M before the latter was invented. I'm guessing someone from AA invented it?

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UofM popularized the use of Kerberos in academic settings. IIRC, Dug Song added support for Kerberos to SSH, and some other people in Honeyman's group (CITI) connected Kerberos to Andrew File System (AFS). But we'd have to ask honey to know for sure.

Kerb was an Athena thing (an interesting project!) at MIT.

Yes, but Microsoft really did do the missing integration of Kerberos V5 into the rest of the system (LDAP and the login system). MSFT started this work ("NT5") in 1995, just a bare few years after MIT published the first implementation of Kerberos V5 (though Kerberos IV came half a decade earlier still). That took MSFT ~5 years to complete, and they shipped this as Windows 2000.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (RIP), completely failed to respond appropriately to that, and Active Directory ate Sun DS's lunch eventually.

I was at the Windows 2000 unveiling at UofM where the copied tech was shown and had this feeling I saw this before. Not sure about the down votes here?

Don’t say I didn’t warn you, Sun ;)

LDAP, UofM, is better X.500. MIT and other schools were all connected over Kerberos from before, DoD? Hence the connection.

LDAP is a UofM innovation. Tim Howes, a Peter Honeyman student, wrote his dissertation about it, and then went on to found Loudcloud with Ben Horowitz.

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