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Re: Clarification of RootDSE information retrieval required



> I agree with your assessment -- most of the attributes commonly found in
> the root DSE are operational attributes and according to the RFCs they
> should not be returned unless listed by name.
> 
> However, I would like to lobby for a change to the RFCs to relax this for
> the root DSE.  I think it is useful and not harmful to return all root DSE
> attributes even when they are not named explicitly.  This makes it easier

Mark,

There is a customer of yours who would like to disagree with you. (I know 
because I was talking to him last week about this very point, before your 
email). There is at least one operational attribute in your root DSE that is 
related to the security of your DIT (access controls), and, according to the 
customer, you always return this to the caller. This is a potential security 
weakness. Therefore there may be some operational attributes that should not 
be returned unless specifically named and the caller's access rights give him 
permission to read them.

David

> for client implementors to discover what server meta information is
> available, is easier to debug, and so on.  In the interest of full and
> fair disclosure, I will admit that Netscape's LDAP server implementation
> already behaves this way.
> 
> -- 
> Mark Smith
> Directory Architect / Netscape Communications Corp.
> My words are my own, not my employer's.  Got LDAP?
> 
> 


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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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