[davidw]

I know my way around Unix, and am a fast learner, so "no experience" is not something that generally scares me. I know I'll make some mistakes and waste a bit of time.

That said, there are plenty of systems that I have encountered in my years that are much friendlier to a new user. Specifically, I recall awful command line queries, kind of wonky tools in general, and, generally, a fiddly feeling to the whole thing. I did get things working, but I was never really happy with the whole setup. We ended up calling in a consultant to check over my work and see if there were ways to improve it, and aside from a few things, there really weren't.

[buster]

Yes, but honestly, in my world "a strange feeling" doesn't qualify for ojective proof that a system is bad. There are plenty of powerful tools, and if you don't like the commandline (although you say you use unix a lot, ldap commands are straight forward), you probably could've used GUIs in the most cases. My "feeling" of this thread is that people were unsatisfied with openldap and now blame a protocol. The major enterprise directories have a lot of additional commands/features/web interfaces to fiddle with. It's not the protocols problem when a specific implementation is hard to use, isn't it?