RE: About aliases an X.500....

[Alan Lloyd <Alan.Lloyd@OpenDirectory.com.au>]

Harald,  Naturally if a DSA is not flexible with its structure rules
against one that is then interoperability (or compatability) will be an
issue. Thats not an X.500 problem - thats a a supplier problem. If you
are troubkled with this - buy ours.

In addition because we use an RDB with our table design and everything
indexed the information in the DIB is effectively flat. Alias or
otherwise. Tree shapes dont matter. So sometimes a search on the DIB
with "Chaining Prohibited" (DAP feature - NOT IN LDAP - No distribution)
for "Sales" thingys will work. just as well. 

Alias things are good for "views" when browsing. Searching with strong
predicates and controls on chaining and DMD scope are good for Finding.
Regards alan


> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Harald Tveit Alvestrand [SMTP:Harald.Alvestrand@maxware.no]
> Sent:	Wednesday, April 08, 1998 11:11 PM
> To:	Alan Lloyd
> Cc:	ietf-ldapext@netscape.com
> Subject:	RE: About aliases an X.500....
> 
> Thanks Alan - the point about search scope goes like:
> 
> - have an organization where the namespace is divided first
>   by locality, then by OU, with 5 out of 30 locations having
>   parts of the "sales" OU, and all locations operate 1 DSA
> - for some reason, want to limit a search to the Sales OU, and
>   not touch the 25 irrelevant DSAs
> - Solution: have an alias tree called "Sales" under the O level,
>   with 5 locality-names pointing to the 5 relevant sales OUs.
> 
> (in parenthesis - this is a case where Ed's "only the same class"
> restriction has trouble, unless one uses OUs for localities...or I
> might have misunderstood Ed).
> 
> (paren 2: this illustrates the interoperability problem - if one DSA
> allows "alias named anything pointing to anything", and another DSA
> disallows the
> "alias named with L pointing to an object named with OU", the DIT
> structure is forced by what product you buy, not by what you want....)
> 
> (CIP advocates will claim that the same thing can be accomplished
> without preconfiguration by noting that the index objects for the
> DSAs shows that only 5 of the 15 DSAs have entries with OU=sales.
> But CIP is not at the moment deployed technology in either X.500 or
> LDAP)
> 
>                       Harald A
> 
> -- 
> Harald Tveit Alvestrand, Maxware, Norway
> Harald.Alvestrand@maxware.no