RE: gluing directories with draft-ietf-ldapext-locate-02.txt

Alan,

I did not read so deeply into Kurt's proposal. But from what I understood, since the DNS SRV records were used for advertising LDAP servers, one could easily leverage it for gluing directories. Not to mention the fact that this will not be the ONLY approach that will ever exists. If the LDAP server provides the smarts for doing so I think clients would be pleased to get better referals. Don't you?

I do agree with your views, and I think I get it correct, that with the DNS SRV approach, proper "service" oriented advertisements is not yet defined. I would like a better mechanism wherein services hosted by LDAP servers are properly defined so that service vendors could use a proper advertising template and provide the relevant information and I as a service consumer could lookup the "NET" and with some good and smart query tool exactly locate the service vendor who would be ready to service my requirements within the resource limits I specify. This is analogous to the web approach taken today. I am thinking, dreaming and haven't had any formal or informal discussions with anybody on this yet. I was planning on sending an email to Bob Morgan/Paul Leach to run this idea by them and see what they think about. This email actually brought me into the the mood of writing this down and emailing it to everybody. Give me your thoughts on this.

sganguly@novell.com

>>> "Lloyd, Alan" <Alan.Lloyd@ca.com> 05/14/00 08:47PM >>>
Is anyone concerned that "gluing directories with LDAP" is only providing a
system which is slow, has lots of overheads, is more complex than X.500 and
will only deal with publically accessable attributes for non authenticated
users.
- ie one cannot put a consistent ,distributed authentication and access
control regime over this AND one cannot do predictable (response time)
distributed searches that are controlled/protected by the server at the
client access point - or provide "service" based correlation of the
responses according to User profiles or domain access control settings.

To me this is definitely not what "large scale" directory users want...an
unprotected, uncoordinated, non deterministic "information" infrastructure

Sorry - Just my views

regards alan

    -----Original Message-----
    From:    Kurt D. Zeilenga
    Sent:    Saturday, May 13, 2000 6:10 AM
    To:    ietf-ldapext@netscape.com
    Subject:    gluing directories with
draft-ietf-ldapext-locate-02.txt

    The intro to this draft states this may be used by clients
    (or servers acting as clients). I'd like to add that it
    may also be used by servers acting as servers to generate
    appropriate referrals to requests not held by the server.
    That is, if a client requests a DN not held by a server,
    that server could use DNS SRV to produce a suitable
    referral to the client.

    I have an example of such a server operating (experimentally)
    at ldap://root.openldap.org. It will generate LDAPv3 (and
    LDAPv2+) referrals using the method similar to that described
    in the I-D.

    Enjoy!
        Kurt

    // pseudo code: real code is available from OpenLDAP public
    // source repository. http://www.openldap.org/software/repo.html
    domain=NULL
    foreach( rdn of dn ) // left to right
    {
        if multiple value rdn {
            domain=NULL;
            continue;
        }
        if rdn attribute type == "dc" {
            if( domain != NULL ) {
                domain = concat( domain, "." );
            }
            domain = concat( domain, rdn value );
            continue;
        }
        domain=NULL;
    }

    if( domain != NULL ) {
        if( DNSSRV( domain ) ) {
            return referral;
        }
    }
    return noSuchObject;