Red Hat Summit: Single sign-on via IPA server

Linux distributor Red Hat is venturing into the field of identity management and has presented a new package at the Red Hat Summit in Boston: Red Hat Enterprise IPA. IPA is an abbreviation for Identity, Policy and Audit and is based on the FreeIPA project.

Technically speaking the developers added a Lightweight Directoy Access Protocol (LDAP) backend to their own Directory Server, combined it with Kerberos and gave it a well-presented GUI for easy management. Several servers can be installed to ensure adequate load sharing and availability on a network, automatically sharing their data via multi-master replication. On Unix and Linux systems, this allows single sign-ons without the need for installing additional software agents on the clients.

Scheduled for release at the end of the year, version 2 is to provide the functionality required for "P" and "A", for example central policy management and central audits.

For more information about the Red Hat Summit 2008 see also:

• Red Hat Summit: embedded hypervisor and Web front-end for virtualisation environments
• Xandros releases a free management tool for Red Hat Server
• Red Hat Summit 2008 opens in Boston

(trk)