RE: A philosophical question about large directory structures

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

------=_NextPart_000_0001_01BED2D9.EED930E0
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Tim,
I agree with you that domain names are what people are good at guessing
these days.  I think that we learned that lesson at least twice, once with
email and once with the web.

I have been preaching the idea of the DN as just a pointer to an entry since
the early 90s and have always hid them from all of my applications.  I'm
glad that others are seeing the value in that, but it has been a long road.

Naming has always been an ugly thing and it has caused lots of grief to all
of us in the directory space, as well as others.  Everyone seems to take
names very seriously - and understandably so.  The real question is how to
do we get past that.  I think that dc naming gets us part of the way there.
What we need is a mechanism where if we don't know the dc, to go out and
find it - and hopefully we can do that with protocol most of the time.

You made an interesting comment early on in this thread that 4 years ago you
realized that directories wouldn't be all connected and that it was probably
a bad thing if they were.  I tend to disagree with that.  I think that you
were right 4 years ago that the current method of doing it was not workable
for both social and technical reasons.  However, that doesn't remove the
need for doing it some day.  If you think of DNS as a form of directory,
then it is possible and is useful.  I think that there are many applications
that are currently disabled because they can't get to information that could
be stored in directories.

We are on the verge of having directories deployed in almost every company
with an IT department on the planet, many of them will have multiple
directories from multiple vendors.  At that point, it will be clear that we
need to quickly figure out how to do it, and the rewards will be great.
Just think back of what it was like to maintain HOSTS tables for every
system running IP, and that wasn't very long ago.  I think that twenty years
from now, we'll be talking about the good 'ol days when business to business
communication that uses directories was just a dream that many of us were
saying would never happen.  And noone will believe that they made routers
and hubs that didn't use DEN...

-- Alexis


Alexis Bor
Directory Works, Inc.
P.O. Box 470276
Celebration, FL  34747-0276
407-566-9250
407-566-9251 (FAX)
[email protected]
http://www.directoryworks.com


> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected]
> [mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of
> Tim Howes
> Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 1999 6:58 PM
> To: Erik Skovgaard
> Cc: Thomas Lenggenhager; [email protected]
> Subject: Re: A philosophical question about large directory structures
>
>
> Just an opinion, but I don't think anybody wants to
> guess at distinguished names. I actually think it's
> likely to be significantly less effective than trying
> to guess domain names, which people seem to be guessing
> or otherwise figuring out today without too much
> trouble. And I don't think any respectable user agents
> will support guessing except possibly as some last
> resort mode of operation. We've seen directory clients
> moving more and more toward hiding DNs from users, and
> I think that's a very good thing and one we're likely
> to see increasingly.                 -- Tim
>
> Erik Skovgaard wrote:
> >
> > Thomas,
> >
> > I agree that namespaces have to be unique, but I *also*
> believe they should
> > make sense to users.  Granted, *some* host names are
> user-friendly, but
> > many are not.
> >
> > In the specific example you mention, I would suggest that {o=Sun
> > Microsystems, c=ch} is a reasonable and guessable
> namespace.  I would not
> > venture to guess what your hostname is.
> >
> > Cheers,                  ....Erik.
> >
> > -----------------------------------
> > Erik Skovgaard
> > GeoTrain Corp.
> > Enterprise Directory Engineering
> > http://www.geotrain.com
> >
> > At 23:41 99/06/23 +0200, Thomas Lenggenhager wrote:
> > >On Wednesday, 23 Jun 1999, Erik Skovgaard writes:
> > >> The DC namespace is poorly suited for the Directory
> since the Internet host
> > >> names are not all guessable.  For instance, if I were to
> look up Canadian
> > >> Airlines, I would have to *know* that the hostname is
> 'cdnair.com'.
> > >
> > >We are going a bit off track with these messages about namespace.
> > >
> > >The namespace should mainly be unique. That would be
> provided by DC.
> > >Finding something should not be tried to achieve by
> guessing the right
> > >name, but by searching for it (index/directory).
> > >
> > >> Since the Directory name registration is closely tied to
> the legal names of
> > >> companies in most countries, I think that makes for a
> much better choice.
> > >> I would rather find Canadian Airlines as {o=Canadian
> Airlines, c=ca} than
> > >> the somewhat cryptic {dc=cdnair, dc=com}.
> > >
> > >And how about the official name of Canadian Airlines in
> French and the
> > >DN you proposed?
> > >
> > >What is the official name of a company?
> > >       Acme    or Acme Inc.    or Acme, Inc.
> > >
> > >Just as an example of quite ugly and non-guessable names,
> the official
> > >name of Sun in Switzerland:
> > >       Sun Microsystems (Schweiz) AG
> > >
> > >Thomas
> > >
> > >
>
> --
> Tim Howes
> Vice President, Technology
> Office of the CTO
> America Online, Inc.
>

------=_NextPart_000_0001_01BED2D9.EED930E0
Content-Type: text/x-vcard;
	name="Alexis Bor (E-mail).vcf"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Disposition: attachment;
	filename="Alexis Bor (E-mail).vcf"

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:2.1
N:Bor;Alexis;;;
FN:Alexis Bor (E-mail)
ORG:Directory Works, Inc.;
TITLE:President, CEO
TEL;WORK;VOICE:(407) 566-9250
TEL;HOME;VOICE:
TEL;CELL;VOICE:(407) 701-8662
TEL;WORK;FAX:(407) 566-9251
ADR;WORK:;;P.O. Box 470276;Celebration;FL;34747-0276;United States of =
America
LABEL;WORK;ENCODING=3DQUOTED-PRINTABLE:P.O. Box =
470276=3D0D=3D0ACelebration, FL 34747-0276=3D0D=3D0AUnited States of =
Americ=3D
a
EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:[email protected]
REV:19981130T145934Z
END:VCARD

------=_NextPart_000_0001_01BED2D9.EED930E0--