James Fogg presents Windows-Linux Interop to CentraLUG

[Ted Roche]

On Dec 6, 2005, at 1:58 PM, Ben Scott wrote:

>   Like Mr. Sconce, I wanted to attend, but alas, I was feeling rather
> under the weather yesterday and decided chicken soup and sleep were
> what I needed.  Pity, as from the slides, I missed a very interesting
> (to me) presentation.

Sorry we missed you. Hope you're feeling better. James has expressed  
an interest in giving the presentation again. He originally presented  
at DLSLUG in October. You might want to ask The Powers That Be in  
Nashua if they'd like to invite him.

>   May I ask why?  I mean, sure, Exchange tends to be rather
> anti-social, if not outright psychotic, but what makes Public Folders
> any more evil then the rest of it?

We may want to wait for James to join the mailing list -- I've  
invited him.

Having spent a year writing Automation, MAPI and CDO interfaces and  
event sink components against Exchange, I have a grudging respect for  
the power and scope of the beast.

IIRC, James' issues were that Public Folders were unreliable,  
difficult to back up, inaccessible via Outlook Web Access (an IIS  
exploit masquerading as a Web email client) and more trouble than  
they were worth.

>   That is not strictly correct.  While it's certainly "easier" to just
> let Microsoft do everything their way (anyone surprised by this?), the
> AD domain zone does not have to be AD-integrated on MS-DNS.  It
> doesn't even need to be on MS-DNS.  Technically speaking, it doesn't
> even need to support DNS Dynamic Update, although maintaining the
> records manually kind of sucks.  All that is required for the AD DNS
> zone is that it support SRV records, which are defined in a Standards
> Track RFC, and supported by reasonably recent versions of BIND.

I think this was a simplification for slideware. James did talk about  
mixing and matching DNS and DHCP and alluded to the challenges of this.

>   The one real thing MS-DNS AD-integrated zones get you is "secure"
> Dynamic Update from the AD Domain Controllers to the MS-DNS servers.
> Of course, this is Microsoft's very own security gizmo, and it isn't
> compatible with anything else (AFAIK).

James actually gave MS kudos, grudgingly, for doing most, if not all,  
of their extensions to DHCP, DNS and AD via the RFC process. He was  
surprised, considering their usual modus operadi.