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Comment by __d | Hacker News Reader

> Failure to respond to Active Directory

Sun did really well in the academic workstation market, converting the old "VAX and a sea of terminals" into a "sea of Sun workstations".

X11, YP/NIS and NFS worked pretty well for a while, but then Microsoft came out with NT and AD, and Sun failed to respond. Like, ever. I think this was perhaps the worst software mistake Sun made.

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I tried to sell XAD, the Active Directory workalike I wrote 2002-2006, to Sun. Would’ve integrated nicely with SunDS (a big part consisted of SLAPI plugins). Was in touch with Jonathan Swartz, but no dice. Sold it to Novell instead. Ironically ended up porting SLAPI to eDirectory to integrate it.

I pushed XAD internally. But I didn't have the pull needed.

Sun not acquiring XAD was a big mistake.

I didn't know you tried at Sun. Obviously I was a big XAD fan :-).

It's worse because huge chunk of Active Directory is essentially building on what MIT Athena did, which was heavily used with Sun as well - and all packaged into something that can be brought up operationally by SMB team with no previous experience

Yes, Kerberos is a direct import, although extended quite a bit. AD is a lot more than Hesiod, but AFS is a lot more than SMB. Zephyr didn't make it over.

There was an opportunity to build out graphical management tools, but NIS+ kinda got in the way, and the politics of commercial Unix in general didn't help.

The nice thing with kerberos is that it v5 has extensibility effectively built in :)

I'd say the switch to DAP/LDAP was obvious better choice than Hesiod, and GPO essentially standardizes a lot of tooling that SIPB et al built for Athena as well

Building an AD-compatible service is not that easy, and it was not easy circa 2006, because there was a lot to reverse engineer. Sure, Sun had access to its own directory service (Sun DS), MIT Kerberos, BIND, OpenLDAP, NSS, and Samba, so it had a lot of the pieces, but there was a lot of work to be done putting everything together.

For sure. But Sun had great engineers, and it was a feature that I'd argue was visibly existential at the time.

Sun's engineering culture -and engineers- was the only reason it survived as long as it did. It and they were amazing.

The issue was not reverse engineering Active Directory to make a compatible system, it was that they didn't really capitalize in that direction. Sun has all the necessary pieces to make a compelling option at the time.

Microsoft really only wiped competition in the area when 2000 landed with Active Directory instead of the clunky previous NT Domain system.

Yes. Over-generalizing a bit -perhaps-, the issue was that any Sun division that was a profit center tended to rest on its laurels instead of innovating and disrupting. Solaris was a cost center, so Solaris engineering innovated. The DS folks were a profit center.

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