RE: LDAP Observation

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

Perhaps these stats are humorous - but perhaps they are not.

I think we are now in a position with directory services where LDAP has
gone beyond its purpose of being a standard directory access protocol.
Simply because the client process for dealing with referrals, knowledge,
master/copy servers, extensions, etc is different between LDAP single
(address book) servers and X.500 distributed systems.

The real bad side is the customer expectation in the "LDAP and LDAP
servers are the way to go" - expecting a distributed directory service -
does not get one - so they have to employ many staff to do what the
technology does not do.

However. being an optimist - the more proprietary, complex, optioned up
and non interoperable - and costlier to run and entrenched on single
servers, LDAP gets, the easier it is to deploy X.500.

See there is a good side to LDAP - it convinces many to go X.500 :-)
Thats a meaningful observation.

regards alan


snip
>
>Alan,
>
>I would like to offer the following (meaningless) observation in
relation to
>your comment about LDAP getting bigger and bigger...
>
>This is not meant to be a serious comment, as I am certainly not
intending
>to re-open (yet again) the X.500/LDAP comparisons, but it did strike me
as
>interesting, and something to share on a cold, wet Friday afternoon!
>
>Today, we have approx 10 RFCs related to LDAP.
>We also have at least 25 IDs relating to proposed extensions.
>There are also 10 or so other related IDs.
>A quick survey of these, suggest an average size of 12 pages.
>So in total, we have approx 540 pages of standard and proposed
standards
>related to LDAP.
>This is being added to all the time.
>
>Purely for comparison reasons, I observed that the eight documents
making up
>X.500(93) totals just less than 400 pages.
>I.e., The LDAP paperweight is already one third bigger!
>
>Interesting thought for the weekend:  Is X.500 a lightweight variation
of
>LDAP!
>
>No flames or prolonged discussion please, this message is just meant to
be a
>bit of harmless fun, in reality these statistics are totally
meaningless!
>
>Colin
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Alan Lloyd [mailto:Alan.Lloyd@OpenDirectory.com.au]
>> Sent: Wednesday, September 30, 1998 10:56 PM
>> To: 'Erik Skovgaard '; 'Tim Howes '
>> Cc: 'Chris Newman '; 'Jonathan Trostle '; 'IETF LDAP Extensions WG '
>> Subject: RE: draft minutes from Chicago meeting
>>
>[ ... ]
>>
>> Sorry to me again. I dont believe in fixing one problem at a time.
>> Becuase one ends up in a mess. I believe in designing systems that to
>> the best of my ability dont have problems.
>>
>> I think that what is happening is the LDAP has now made the clients
>> bigger than DSAs and with more and more options going in them
>> particularly for security - incompatability and pain will be common
>> place.
>>
>> My belief is that a solution to a problem creates more
>> problems, then it
>> is not a solution.
>>
>> As you can see LDAP is now creating more and more problems. Perhaps
we
>> should review the design approach.
>>
>
>