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Topic: iRedMail future - OS support

Hello,

I have questions about the future of iRedMail from the point of view of operating systems support.
I personally used my own system that I created using OpenLDAP, Postfix, Dovecot, RoundCube, and so on.
So I do not have the problem to continue using OpenLDAP, but I'm thinking about going to SQL.

RHEL8 will no longer include OpenLDAP, so it will not have guaranteed support for 10 years.
(While it is true that 10 years in the case of iRedMail are only theoretical, because the support for CentOS 6 has been canceled for new installations - https://forum.iredmail.org/topic14077.html Dropped distribution releases: RHEL/CentOS 6)

Therefore, CentOS 8 users will have to deal with the transition to either the OpenLDAP package from EPEL if will exist or will have iRedMail's own OpenLDAP package similar to the one now available with e.g. dovecot? https://dl.iredmail.org/yum/rpms/7/

I found: https://forum.iredmail.org/topic13706-s … ation.html
For iRedMail-0.9.7, we have 5152 CentOS-7 installations, but 2264 CentOS-6 installations.

Is there any statistics for real numbers of iRedMail operating systems?
And how is the SQL vs. LDAP ratio?

Are your recommendations at https://forum.iredmail.org/topic13377-i … stall.html preferential or sorted by alphabet? The answer is over a year old, so what would it be now with regard to the future as we already know about the end of OpenLDAP support in RHEL8?

I have also noticed an unresolved switch to slapd.d: https://bitbucket.org/zhb/iredmail/issu … -to-slapdd
So LDAP may be less well represented and much less used.
(I'm still using slapd.conf too and just because slapd.d I'm considering switching to SQL. But working with LDAP is still more familiar to me, so maybe I still have the last little chance to stay with OpenLDAP.)

What is your opinion and recommendation?

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Spider Email Archiver: On-Premises, lightweight email archiving software developed by iRedMail team. Supports Amazon S3 compatible storage and custom branding.

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Re: iRedMail future - OS support

SiTD wrote:

Therefore, CentOS 8 users will have to deal with the transition to either the OpenLDAP package from EPEL if will exist or will have iRedMail's own OpenLDAP package similar to the one now available with e.g. dovecot? https://dl.iredmail.org/yum/rpms/7/

- OpenLDAP is very important for many companies, we definitely will continue supporting OpenLDAP in CentOS 8 + iRedMail.
- We expect EPEL to offer RPM packages after RHEL8 released (https://rpms.remirepo.net/rpmphp/zoom.php?rpm=openldap), if it doesn't, we will try to use some other trusted yum repo instead.

SiTD wrote:

Is there any statistics for real numbers of iRedMail operating systems?
And how is the SQL vs. LDAP ratio?

For iRedMail-0.9.8 (deployment times / distro):

17782    UBUNTU-xenial-16.04
10149    RHEL-centos-7
9074    UBUNTU-bionic-18.04
7368    DEBIAN-stretch-9
1085    FREEBSD
308    RHEL-rhel-7
146    OPENBSD--6.3

For backends:

47293    mysql
24151    openldap
12773    pgsql
SiTD wrote:

what would it be now with regard to the future as we already know about the end of OpenLDAP support in RHEL8?

- My recommendation is always the same: choose the one (backend) you're familiar with.
- As mentioned above, we will try our best to deliver OpenLDAP support in RHEL/CentOS 8. if you want to switch to SQL backend just because of OpenLDAP package not offered by RHEL officially, i think it's not necessary.

OpenLDAP is a great OSS, it's lightweight, stable, easy to configure and manage, great performance, i don't think it's that easy to replace by 389 Directory Server. I personally treat the removal from RHEL/SUSE as a marketing strategy, for them to get more clients on 389DS.

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Re: iRedMail future - OS support

ZhangHuangbin wrote:

OpenLDAP is very important for many companies, we definitely will continue supporting OpenLDAP in CentOS 8 + iRedMail.

Thank you for clear answer.

ZhangHuangbin wrote:

OpenLDAP is a great OSS, it's lightweight, stable, easy to configure and manage, great performance, i don't think it's that easy to replace by 389 Directory Server. I personally treat the removal from RHEL/SUSE as a marketing strategy, for them to get more clients on 389DS.

And perhaps because of this:
https://access.redhat.com/solutions/2440481
389-ds:  The package is not supported as a stand-alone solution to provide LDAP services.

They focus on single products and not alternatives. Similarly, they will cancel KDE. But this is off-topic now.

It will also be interesting to wait for accurate information on Ubuntu's 10 year support. Probably ESM. https://askubuntu.com/questions/1093582 … rt/1093956

Package slapd is in 'main' section of Ubuntu repositories - so better security and bugfix support like EPEL (???)

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Re: iRedMail future - OS support

Debian/Ubuntu don't have similar announcement, so i suppose OpenLDAP package is fine with Debian/Ubuntu distros.