> Hi Les, while I understand where you're coming from, I don't quite agree
> with you. A programming language doesn't make security mistakes, the coder
> does :)

I didn't mean the language is going to cause the problem.  I meant that
coding mistakes are inevitable when you start from scratch and take
years to find and fix - a headstart those other frameworks already have.

> What I'm looking for, is which programming language will be best,
> i.e. fastest. My OS of choice would be CentOS, but even then that won't make
> a difference either.

That's all almost irrelevant. Unless you make horrible coding mistakes,
nothing you do within the programming language will take significant
time compared to reading/writing the config files and database activity.

> I can do most of this in PHP, but I do think PHP is a bit slow for this,
> being a scripting language, and not a compiled language.

Measure what's really happening.

> LDAP can / would but be one component of the whole thing, and I'm not very
> fond of JAVA, since it's rather slow. Ideally I need something which could
> interact with the OS layer directly

Java is only slow when you have to start a new JVM.  I'd expect this to
be run under tomcat or similar web container where the JVM would always
be running.  Again, measure a few things to get the idea.  A tomcat app
is easy enough to test - there are a few packaged ones to get the idea.
 As far as talking to the OS goes, all languages have ways to do that.
 Perl is probably the closest-to-native for most things - and has
modules  with embedded C-library access for anything else you might
need.  But java has built-in remote execution if you want to make this
work on more than one machine.

--

  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell@gmail.com

_______________________________________________