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Re: LDAP Observation
> 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.
Be careful with your comparison. I have never seen any test or deployment in
which DISP interoperability among major X.500 vendors actually was achieved.
When, for example, an ICL-based, an ISODE-based and a DataCraft-based product
are interconnected, what is the subset of X.500 that works transparently?
DANTE carried out several attempts in 1996 and 1997 to get X.500(93)
interoperability. The quotes below are from the report located at
http://www.dante.net/np/93pilot/phase2-results.html
"Some ACI testing was carried out after some initial configuration problems,
there still seems to be difficulty in participants being able to
correctly configure all the relatively simple ACIs required. To quote one
participant "...ACI configuration is very tricky..."
No ACI tests were performed on shadowed data, presumably because only
two participants managed to get shadowing to work, most people had
problems with the un-shadowed ACI tests.
1. Vendors do not appear to be committed to genuine multi-vendor
interoperability. Possibly for very good commercial reasons, many seem to
unofficially perceive that there is no money to be made expending too much
effort working on multi-vendor interoperability. This is backed up by the
fact that most X.500 directory products are being sold into homogenous
environments where interoperability is not an issue."
Also the page count argument seemed to have a four year gap in it. LDAPv3
was published in 1997, and in 1998 there are interoperable shipping
products from multiple vendors. (I know this as most of Innosoft customers'
deploy LDAPv3 products into environments where they interconnect with
existing LDAPv2, LDAPv3 or X.500 clients and servers from other vendors using
referrals, secure chaining, protocol translation, replication and
synchronization).
The X.500 numbers were from the 1993 edition. When will the 1997 X.500
documents be published, how many pages will they be, and when might there be
interoperabilty between vendors using X.500(97) features?
Just curious,
Mark Wahl, Directory Product Architect
Innosoft International, Inc.