IdP Operating System selection best current practice

[Peter Schober]

* King, David <dsmk at bu.edu> [2014-01-27 22:24]:
> We are considering whether to use Windows or Centos for the IdP
> given that we eventually hope to validate passwords against our
> Active Directory server.

Only adding to what Kevin and Nate said, I'd prefer an OS that has
packages for Java and provides timely updates.

The old habit of downloading a JRE from sun.com (or its legal
successor) and unpacking it in /usr/local -- or even installing it
once manually via package management -- is the best way to never get
any security updates applied. So avoid that approach, no matter the
platform.

Same probably goes for the servlet container, if you find packages
which are usable.  Personally for Tomcat on CentOS I like recommend
the ones provided by Jason Brittain[1] a lot and always used those
whenever I was stuck on something RHELish.

As for authenticating to MS-AD the IDP's OS makes no difference when
interfacing to AD via LDAP. I'm not so sure about Kerberos setup, but
then I don't know whether that's relevant for you.
-peter

[1] https://code.google.com/p/webdroid-tomcat-package/