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Re: input on draft-ieft-svrloc-ldap-scheme-01.txt

Hi Ed,

>
>There are several other attributes which I think it would be very useful to have 
SLP expose about LDAP servers...all generally available from the LDAP root DSE 
entries...to assist clients or directories themselves in finding other 
directories whose address are not known.
>
>1) naming contexts - The naming contexts held by a directory server can be very 
valuable.  Even when an LDAP URL, which contains a DNS name of the server where 
the ldap service is located, there may very well be times when the client, or 
another directory, needs to find any server which holds a particular naming 
context.

You are absolutely right -- in fact, we consider this attribute to be universally 
important to all naming and directory services, hence we put it in the abstract 
template, naming-directory (draft-ietf-svrloc-naming-directory-00.txt). Here is 
the attribute and description from that template:

naming-context= string M
  # A list of the names of organizational units or domains which
  # this server serves.

>
>2) vendor/version/patch level - as a way to support clients which are backwardly 
compatible, but which have preference for later versions of servers which are 
more likely to support their specific requirements (ie, LDAPv2 vs LDAPv3, or 
Microsoft's LDAP server, or Netscape's, etc.)
>

This is a good idea. How about creating two attributes to convey this 
information:

version= string M
  # Which version(s) of LDAP this server supports. "v3" corresponds to
  # the protocol as defined by RFC 2251, and "v2" corresponds to the
  # protocol as defined by RFC 1777.
v2,v3

extensions= string M
  # This is an open-ended attribute intended to contain any standard or
  # non-standard (i.e. vendor-specific) extensions this server supports.

I propose two separate attributes since the version is a well-bounded property, 
and thus all clients will be able to make use of it. The extensions property, on 
the other hand, is unbounded, and can thus be a "catch-all" attribute which 
vendor- or extension-specific clients can make use of.

Jon