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draft-ietf-locate-00.txt

Please publish this draft for the LDAPEXT WG.

Attached is the updated "Discovering LDAP Services with DNS" draft.  

thanks,
Michael


 <<draft-ietf-ldapext-locate-00.txt>> 

INTERNET-DRAFT                                         Michael P. Armijo
<draft-ietf-ldapext-locate-00.txt>                          Levon Esibov
September, 1999                                               Paul Leach
Expires: March, 1999                               Microsoft Corporation

                Discovering LDAP Services with DNS

Status of this Memo

   This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with
   all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
   Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups.  Note that
   other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-
   Drafts.

   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
   and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
   time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet- Drafts as reference
   material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

   The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at
   http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt

   The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at
   http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html.

   Distribution of this memo is unlimited.  It is filed as <draft-
   ietf-ldapext-locate-00.txt>, and expires on February 10, 1999.  
   Please send comments to the authors.

1. Abstract

This draft defines a way that native Internet LDAP servers can make 
use of the DNS's knowledge base to provide clients a method to 
resolve LDAP services for a given domain.


2. Introduction

The LDAPv3 protocol [RFC 2251] is designed to be a 
lightweight access protocol for directory services supporting X.500 
models. This may be the X.500 directory itself, but the LDAP 
specification explicitly allows it to be a different directory.  
Let us define a "native LDAP server" to be one that is not a front 
end to the X.500 directory service. Let us further define an "Internet 
based organization" as one that has a domain name, and an "Internet 
LDAP server" to be one containing a directory entries for such an 
organization.

This draft defines a way that native Internet LDAP servers can make 
use of the DNS's knowledge base to perform the same function, while 
still supporting integration with the X.500 directory.

This draft builds [RFC 2247] to define a mechanism by which collections 
of native Internet LDAP servers can be integrated to create a directory 
service. That work supports this cause by defining a mapping from an
LDAP DN to a DNS name that can be resolved to the address of a server 
holding the entry corresponding to the DN. For example, the DN 
"CN=Fred,OU=Eng,DC=example,DC=net" maps to the DNS name "example.net". 
In an Internet context, many of the names about which users seek 
information are DNS names, or include DNS names. A native LDAP based 
directory service for the Internet should make it convenient to 
process such names -- there is a huge social investment spanning two 
decades to get to the point where names like 
"john.doe@somewhere.example" and "http://www.example.net"; can 
appear in newspaper articles, TV commercials, and on billboards 
and millions of people understand what to do with them. As a result, 
we assume that Internet based organizations wish to preserve this 
investment, yet also want to deploy directory services.

Widespread use of, and dependence on, LDAP services will require that 
they are robust and scalable. Both of these features are typically 
supported by replicated servers. Use of SRV records to locate LDAP 
servers supports clients' use of replicated servers.


3. Locating LDAP servers through DNS

LDAP server location information is to be stored using DNS SRV record
specified in [6].  Such SRV record contains the DNS name of the
server that provides the LDAP service, corresponding Port number, and
parameters that enable the client to choose an appropriate server 
according to the algorithm described in [6] in case of multiple 
LDAP servers, servicing the same domain.  The name of this record 
always has the following format:

_Service._Proto.Domain

where Service name is always "ldap", Proto is a protocol that can be
either "udp" or "tcp", and Domain is the ldap domain that this record
refers to.

Presence of such records enables clients to find the LDAP servers
(that support required protocol in specified domain) using standard
DNS query [3].
As an example, a client that searches for an LDAP server in the
example.net domain that supports TCP protocol will submit a DNS 
query for a set of SRV records with owner name _ldap._tcp.example.net.
The client will receive the list of SRV records published in DNS that 
satisfy the requested criteria.  The following is an example of such
record:

_ldap._tcp.example.net.	IN	SRV	0 0 389 phoenix.example.net.

The set of returned records may contain multiple records in the case 
where multiple LDAP servers serve the same domain.  Combination with 
the A resource records, such as 

phoenix.example.net. IN A 10.0.0.1

enables clients to directly contact the LDAP servers.


4. Security Considerations

This document describes a method that uses DNS SRV records to 
discover LDAP servers.  All security considerations related to DNS
SRV records are inherited by this document.  See the security 
considerations section in [6] for more details.


5. References

[1] M. Wahl, T. Howes, S. Kille, "Lightweight Directory Access 
Protocol(v3)".  RFC 2251, December 1997.

[2] S. Kille, M. Wahl, "Using Domains in LDAP/X.500 Distinguished 
Names". RFC 2247, January 1998.

[3] P. Mockapetris, RFC 1034, DOMAIN NAMES - CONCEPTS AND FACILITIES,  
November, 1987.

[4] P. Mockapetris, RFC 1035, DOMAIN NAMES - IMPLEMENTATION AND 
SPECIFICATION, November, 1987.

[5] T. Howes, M. Smith, "The LDAP URL Format". RFC 2255  December 1997.

[6] A. Gulbrandsen, P. Vixie, "A DNS RR for specifying the location of 
services (DNS SRV)". http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-
dnsind-rfc2052bis-02.txt, January 1999.


6. Authors' Addresses

Michael P. Armijo
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052
micharm@microsoft.com

Paul Leach
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052
paulle@microsoft.com

Levon Esibov
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052
levone@microsoft.com

Expires March, 1999