Re: A philosophical question about large directory structures

Erik Skovgaard wrote:
> 
> Tim,
> 
> If you do not somehow guess the upper levels of a DIT, you would always
> have initiate large searches before finding the subtree you are looking for.
> 
> Right now you can pretty much assume that most commercial entities will be
> under the .com domain, but what happens when we have many other TLDs?  Is
> every single client going to maintain a list of all the second level
> domains?  Even if they did (which would require a client with lots of
> memory), I would still find host names that may not look like a company
> name at all.

I don't think there is any hope of a guessing approach or a "search
everything across many servers" approach to work.  A "directory or
directories" will be needed, which is what I thought CIP was all about. 
To find someone you need to do both of these steps:

1) Locate the directory service or services that might have information
about the person.

2) Search the services (by contacting organization-specific servers or
similar) and retrieve information about the person you are seeking.

LDAP is sufficient for 2) but not for 1) by itself.  Actually, the
problem is not with LDAP but, as many others here have pointed out, it
is with registering directory services and building a global service. 
There is no incentive for anyone to do it... and not enough incentive
for everyone to play nice together to build it.

 
> ...
> Some companies are lucky enough to have "good" domain names (such as
> Netscape), but many will not.  I would rather see the Directory as an aid
> to finding the hostname than using an artificial and at times misleading name.
> 
> We are talking about a Directory infrastructure that should be able to
> scale significantly.  I shudder just thinking of the large number searches
> that would be required if the .com domain were divided up among thousands
> of DSAs.  Who would maintain the knowledge references?
> 
> I would argue that the .com name space is simply too flat.

I doubt it... how many .com domains are there today?  Also, the
"directory of directories" approach nicely separates the naming problem
(I say use dc naming but use whatever you like) from the directory
service location problem.  Tying these two problems together too tightly
is a hopeless approach.  It hasn't worked so far.

-- 
Mark Smith
Directory Architect / Sun-Netscape Alliance
My words are my own, not my employer's.  Got LDAP?