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Subschema management (was Abstract object class)
Ed Reed wrote:
> > Note that even within administrative domains (corporations, for
> > instance) it's vital that departments and org units within the larger
> > namingContext have their own schema - it's unreasonable for the software
> > purchased by Sales in NYC to extend the schema for Engineering in Denver
> > when they have separate internal administrative domains with separate
> > administrators and namespaces. But both still reside within the larger
> > corporate namingContext, and may need to be subject to a common
> > organizational schema onto which their schema extensions are laid.
>
And Jeff added:
> I just want to simply "second" the above requirement statement. It's clear
> in our deployment at Stanford that such capabilities are needed. And
> replication needs to play into this also.
>
> I wasn't aware of the "content rules" notion in X.500(93). Thanks to Ed,
> Erik, and Paul for the enlightening discussion.
If we want to keep in sync with the X.500 administrative model, then we cannot
have inner administrative authorities for subschema, whereby departments add
their own subschema definitions to their bits of the tree. The schema for the
whole administrative domain (the organisation) must be held in a single
subschema subentry. There are two solutions to this as I see it (using the
existing X.500 model)
i) the organisation's naming context is partitioned into separate administrative
domains for subschema management, and each domain can set its own
subschema in its own subentry. In this case the common schema used by the
whole organisation would only be held externally on paper somewhere, and not
actually in the DIT.
ii) the organisation is not partitioned for subschema management, but the
various departmental administrators are given access permissions to update
the subschema subentry by adding their own definitions to it (note adding and
not deleting!!). The new definitions do however apply to the whole organisation.
In this case we have devolved management but global applicability.
On my reading of X.500, content rules on their own do not provide a solution,
since these are held in the single subschema subentry.
David
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David Chadwick
IT Institute, University of Salford, Salford M5 4WT
Tel +44 161 295 5351 Fax +44 161 745 8169
Mobile +44 370 957 287
Email D.W.Chadwick@iti.salford.ac.uk
Home Page http://www.salford.ac.uk/its024/chadwick.htm
Understanding X.500 http://www.salford.ac.uk/its024/X500.htm
X.500/LDAP Seminars http://www.salford.ac.uk/its024/seminars.htm
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