Internal Conference: Day 2: SharePoint, Linux AuthN and Virtual Server

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Connecting UNIX and Linux to Active Directory

I went to this session today - presenter discussed methods to achieve a single username and password.
The main methods are defining an authentication database for either platform and using a sync tool like MIIS etc. Obviously
thats going to be kludgy and will never achieve true Single Sign On. The bit I liked was the configuration of a Linux machine to Kerberos sign on to Active Directory.
That was cool. That means full ticket based SSO which is real SSO! :) Vintela does it better than what the platform has by default but you can do it, albeit hard and with limitations, without it.
Sounds like I might have to do a blogcast on that one and show you how its done now that I know! Will do it when I get back home.

Office 12 SharePoint Technologies

Went to a session on SharePoint v3 to come out around 4th quarter of this year. Great demo on whats coming including document libraries. Anyone whos done anything in
the first version of SharePoint Portal will remember the document library it had and the granular ACL control it had. This functionality disappeared in WSS and SPS2003.
Its back in SharePoint v3!
Language Localisation is better with full language support without needing to have a separate SharePoint box per language.
Theres much more too like ASP.NET 2.0, Recycle Bin, Workflow, Pluggable AuthN, fine grained ACL control across the platform, Web
and Document Content Management, RSS Support, offline document library support...you can even build Wiki's and Blogs with it!
Was very cool to finally see real running code!

Clustering with Virtual Server R2

Now you probably knew this one. I didnt because I havent really kept up with Virtual Server enough.
Virtual Server R2 has full failover clustering in three areas. First area is if you have a say, two node cluster solution connected together with shared storage/SAN etc.
Virtual Server is now supported on this hardware and if one node needs to be taken offline for a patch to be applied or the hardware has a problem etc then you can failover the virtual machines
to the other node. Very nice. The second area is if you dont have hardware like this. You can now use iSCSI to set up clusters between Virtual Server instances. John Howard
has some great blogcasts on how this is done. The third area is of course what even shipping Virtual Server 2005 had which is clustering within the same instance of Virtual Server
itself.