RE: Beginning taxonomy for finding LDAP servers.

[Ryan Moats <jayhawk@att.com>]

> David Chadwick [David>] originally wrote and Jeff Hodges [Jeff>] replied

David> Ryan
David>
David> There is another approach that you have not mentioned, and that is
David> to have an LDAP knowledge server. The LDAP knowlegde server
David> holds cross references to possibly hundreds of other LDAP servers.
David> THen a client only needs to know about its local LDAP server and
David> the knowledge server. The knowledge server will return a referral to
David> the correct LDAP server that holds a particular naming context. This
David> method allows both the dc and country based naming schemes to
David> co-exist, as a knowledge server can hold references to both types of
David> DN (since there are no name clashes between them, all the DNs are
David> still unique)
David>
David> With replication between knowledge servers, this information can be
David> distributed around the world quite easily.

Jeff>d.w.chadwick@iti.salford.ac.uk said:
Jeff>> There is another approach that you have not mentioned, and that is
to
Jeff>> have an LDAP knowledge server. The LDAP knowlegde server  holds cross
Jeff>> references to possibly hundreds of other LDAP servers.
Jeff>
Jeff>Good point, though I think this approach is essentially covered by the
Jeff>"Method: CIP index objects" section in Ryan's message. Spcifically
using CIP
Jeff>and/or using referral attributes/objects are probably sub-approaches.

Well, yes there are sub-approaches, and so I would modify that portion of
the taxonomy
to be:

Method: Referrals

In LDAPv3, servers can return referrals to the client if the server has
knowledge of
where a query might be satisfiable.  Two ways of deploying referral
information are
deploying an LDAP knowledge server or exchanging CIP index objects between
servers.
An LDAP knowledge server would hold cross references to possibly hundreds of
other LDAP
servers, so that a client would only need to know about its local LDAP
server and the
knowledge server.  If CIP index objects are exchanged between LDAP servers,
then
those objects can also carry URL information for providing referalls to
clients.
In this case, the client would only need to know about the local server.
In both cases, the local server could be discovered by one of the previous
methods
discussed.

Hopefully, this addresses both methods.

Ryan