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rfc:rfc2969

Network Working Group T. Eklof Request for Comments: 2969 L. Daigle Category: Informational October 2000

      Wide Area Directory Deployment - Experiences from TISDAG

Status of this Memo

 This memo provides information for the Internet community.  It does
 not specify an Internet standard of any kind.  Distribution of this
 memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

 Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2000).  All Rights Reserved.

Abstract

 The TISDAG (Technical Infrastructure for Swedish Directory Access
 Gateway) project provided valuable insight into the current reality
 of deploying a wide-scale directory service.  This document
 catalogues some of the experiences gained in developing the necessary
 infrastructure for a national (i.e., multi-organizational) directory
 service and pilot deployment of the service in an environment with
 off-the-shelf directory service products.  A perspective on the
 project's relationship to other directory deployment projects is
 provided, along with some proposals for future extensions of the work
 (larger scale deployment, other application areas).
 These are our own observations, based on work done and general
 project discussions.  No doubt, other project participants have their
 own list of project experiences; we don't claim this document is
 exhaustive!

Eklof & Daigle Informational [Page 1] RFC 2969 Wide Area Directory Deployment October 2000

Table of Contents

 1.0 Introduction ................................................  2
 1.1 Overview of the TISDAG project ..............................  2
 1.2 Organization of this document ...............................  3
 2.0 The TISDAG project itself ...................................  3
 2.1  TISDAG overview ............................................  3
 2.2 Some successes ..............................................  4
 2.3 Some surprises ..............................................  5
 2.3.1 LDAP objectclasses and the "o" attribute ..................  6
 2.3.1 The Tagged Index Object ...................................  6
 2.3.3  Handling Status Messages .................................  7
 2.3.4  Deployment with Commercial Software ......................  7
 2.4 Some observations ...........................................  7
 2.4.1 Participation of the WDSPs ................................  7
 2.4.2 Index Objects and Referral Index size .....................  8
 2.4.3 Index Object and Query Performance ........................  8
 2.5 Some evolutions .............................................  9
 3.0 Related Projects ............................................ 11
 3.1 The Norwegian Directory of Directories (NDD) ................ 11
 3.2 DESIRE Directory Services ................................... 11
 4.0 Some Directions for TISDAG Next Steps ....................... 12
 4.1 Security support ............................................ 12
 4.2 WDSPs attributes and schemas  ............................... 12
 5.0 Some conclusions ............................................ 13
 6.0 Security Considerations ..................................... 13
 7.0 Acknowledgements ............................................ 13
 8.0 Authors' Addresses .......................................... 13
 9.0 References .................................................. 14
 Appendix -- Specific Software Issues and Deployment Experiences.. 15
 Full Copyright Statement ........................................ 18

1.0 Introduction

1.1 Overview of the TISDAG project

 As described in more detail in [TISDAG], the original intention of
 the TISDAG project was to provide the infrastructure for a national
 whitepages directory service.  To be effective, such an
 infrastructure needed to address the concrete realities of end-users'
 existing client software, as well as the needs of information
 providers ("Whitepages Directory Service Providers" -- WDSPs).  These
 realities include the existence of multiple protocols (so-called
 directory service access protocols, as well as more general Internet
 application protocols such as HTTP and SMTP).  The project was also
 sensitive to the fact that WDSPs have many good reasons for being
 reluctant to relinquish copies of their subscribers' personal data.

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1.2 Organization of this document

 In an effort to communicate the experiences with this project, from
 conception through implementation and pilot deployment, this document
 is divided into 3 major sections.  The first section reviews specific
 lessons learned by the authors through the TISDAG project and
 implementation of one conformant system.  Next, some perspectives are
 offered on the relationship of the TISDAG work to other large-scale
 directory projects that are currently on-going, to give a sense of
 how these efforts might possibly interact.  Finally, some preliminary
 thoughts on applying the DAG system to other applications and
 deployment environments are outlined.  Further suggestions for
 deploying networked DAG servers (meshes) can be found in [DAG-Mesh].
 More discussion of useful development of architectural principles is
 provided in a separate document ([DAG++]).

2.0 The TISDAG project itself

2.1 TISDAG overview

 Briefly, the technical infrastructure proposed for the TISDAG project
 (see [TISDAG] for the complete overview and technical specification)
 provides end-user client software with connection points to perform
 basic whitepages queries.  Different connection points are provided
 for the various protocols end-users are likely to wish to use to
 access the information -- WWW (http), e-mail (SMTP), Whois++, LDAPv2
 and LDAPv3.  For each client, a transaction will be carried out
 within the bounds of the protocol's syntax and semantics.  However,
 since the TISDAG system does not maintain a replicated copy of all
 whitepages information, but rather an index over the data that allows
 redirection (referrals) to services that are likely to contain
 responses that match the client's query, a fair bit of background
 work must be done by the DAG system in order to fulfill the client's
 query.
 The first, and most important step, is for the system to make a query
 against the DAG Referral Index -- a server containing index
 information (obtained by the Common Indexing Protocol (see [CIP1,
 CIP2, CIP3]) in the Tagged Index Object format (see [TIO]).  This
 index contains sufficient information to indicate which of the many
 participating WDSPs should be contacted to complete the query.
 Wherever possible, these referrals are passed back to the querying
 client so that it can contact relevant WDSPs directly.  This
 minimizes the amount of work done by the DAG system itself, and
 allows WDSPs greater visibility (which is an incentive for
 participating in the system).  Protocols which support referrals
 natively include Whois++ and LDAPv3 -- although these may only be
 referred to servers of the same protocol.

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 Since many protocols do not support referrals (e.g., LDAPv2), and in
 order to address referrals to servers using a protocol other than the
 calling client's own, a secondary step of "query chaining" is
 provided to pursue these extra referrals within the DAG system
 itself.  For example, if an LDAPv2 client connects to the system, a
 query is made against the Referral Index to determine which WDSPs may
 have answers for the query, and then resources within the DAG system
 are used to pursue the query at the designated WDSPs' servers.  The
 results from these different services are packaged into a single
 response set for the client that made the query.
 The architecture that was developed in order to support the required
 functionality separated the system into distinct components to handle
 incoming queries from client software ("Client Access Points", or
 CAPs), a referral index (RI) to maintain an index over the collected
 whitepages information and provide referrals, based on actual data
 queries, to WDSPs that might have relevant information, and finally
 components that mediate access to WDSP whitepages servers to perform
 queries and retrieve results for the client's query ("Service Access
 Points", or SAPs).  Several CAPs and SAPs exist within the system --
 at least one for every protocol supported for incoming queries and
 WDSP servers, respectively.
 Designed to be implementable as separate programs, these components
 interact with each other through the use of an internal protocol --
 the DAG/IP.  Pragmatically, the use of the protocol means that
 different components can reside on different machines, for reasons of
 load-balancing and performance enhancement.  It also acts as a
 "common language" for the CAPs, SAPs and RI to express queries and
 receive results.
 This outlines the planned or ideal behaviour of the system; once
 designed, a pilot phase was started for the project to compare
 reality against expectations.  Two independent implementations of the
 software were created, and a test deployment was set up within the
 Swedish University Network (SUNET).  More detail on the project and
 its current status can be found at http://tisdag.sunet.se/.
 The rest of this section outlines some conclusions drawn from making
 a reality of the proposed architecture -- both successes and
 surprises.

2.2 Some successes

 Implementation and pilot deployment of software meeting the TISDAG
 technical specification did demonstrate some important successes of
 the approach.

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 Most notably, the system works pretty much as expected (see
 exceptions below) to provide transparent middleware for whitepages
 directory services.  That is, client software and WDSP servers were
 minimally affected -- from the point of view of behaviour and
 configuration, the DAG system looked like a server to clients, and a
 client to servers.
 The goal of the TISDAG project, operationally, was to be able to
 provide responses to end-user queries in reasonable response times
 (although not "an addressbook replacement").  The prototype systems
 demonstrated some success in achieving responses within 10 seconds,
 at least with the limited testbed of a configuration with 10 WDSP's
 providing directory service information.  More observations on system
 performance are provided below.
 The DAG system does demonstrate that it is possible to build
 referral-level services at a national level (although the deployment
 has yet to prove conclusively that it can, in its current
 formulation, operate as a transparent query-fulfillment proxy
 service).
 The success of the implementation demonstrated that it is possible,
 in some sense, to do (semantic) protocol mapping with N+M complexity
 instead of NxM mappings.  That is, protocol translations had to be
 defined for "N" allowable end-user query access protocols to/from the
 DAG/IP, and "M" supported WDSP server protocols, instead of requiring
 each of the N input components to individually map to the M output
 protocols.
 As a correlated issue, the prototype system demonstrated some
 successes with mapping between schema representations in the
 different protocol paradigms -- in a large part because system's
 schemas were kept simple and focused on the minimal needs to support
 the base service requirements.

2.3 Some surprises

 Over the span of a dozen months from the first "final" document of
 the specification through the implementation and first deployment of
 the software system, a few surprises did surface.  These fell into
 two categories:  those that surfaced when the theoretical
 specification was put into practice, and others that became apparent
 when the resulting system was put into operation with commercial
 software clients and servers.
 More detail is provided in the Appendix concerning specific software
 issues encountered, but some of the larger issues that surfaced
 during the implementation phase are describe below.

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2.3.1 LDAP objectclasses and the "o" attribute

 It came as a considerable surprise, some months into the project,
 that none of the "standard" LDAP person objectclasses   included
 organization ("o") as an attribute. The basic assumption seems to be
 that "o" will be part of the distinguished name for an entry, and
 therefore there is little (if any) cause to list it out separately.
 This does make it trickier to store information for people across
 multiple organizations (e.g., at an ISP's directory server) and use
 the organization name in query refinement. (Roland Hedberg caught
 this issue, and has flagged it to the authors of the "inetorgperson"
 objectclass document).

2.3.1 The Tagged Index Object

 The Tagged Index Object ("TIO"), used to carry indexes of WDSP
 information to the RI, is designed to have record (entry) tags to
 reduce the number of false positive referrals generated when doing a
 search in the RI.  One of the features of the first index object
 type, Whois++'s centroid (see [centroid]) was the fact that the index
 object size did not grow linearly with the size of data indexed --
 i.e., at some point the growth of the index object slowed as compared
 to that of the underlying data set.  At first glance, this also seems
 to be the case for the TIO.  However, as the index grows in size the
 compression factor of the TIO may not achieve the same efficiency as
 the centroids.  One reason for this is that the tagged lists can get
 quite long, depending on the ordering of the assignment of tags to
 the underlying data.  That is, the tagging as defined allows for a
 compressed expression of tag "ranges" -- e.g., "1-500" instead of
 "1,2,3,[...]500".  Thus, it might be interesting to explore an
 optimal "sorting" of underlying data, before applying tags, in order
 to arrange the most common tokens have consecutive tags (maximal
 compression of the tag lists).  It's not clear if this can be done
 efficiently over the entire set of records, attributes, and tokens,
 but it would bear some investigation, to produce the most compressed
 TIO for transmission.
 Additionally, in order to make (time) efficient use of the tags in
 the RI in practice, it is almost necessary to "reinflate" the index
 object to be able to do joins on tag lists associated with tokens
 that match.  Alternatively, the compressed tag list can be stored,
 and there is an additional cost associated with comparing the tag
 lists for matching tokens -- i.e., list comparison operations done
 outside the scope of a base database management system.  There was an
 unexpected tradeoff to be made.

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2.3.3 Handling Status Messages

 Mapping of status messages from multiple sub-transactions into a
 single status communication for the end-user client software became
 something of a challenge.  When chaining a query to multiple WDSPs
 (though the SAPs), it is not uncommon for at least one of the WDSP
 servers to return an error code or be unavailable.  If one WDSP
 cannot be reached, out of several referrals, should the client
 software be given the impression that the query was completed
 successfully, or not?  Most client protocol error handling models are
 not sophisticated enough to make this level of distinction clear.

2.3.4 Deployment with Commercial Software

 When it then was time to test the resulting software with standard
 commercial client and server software, a few more surprises came to
 light (primarily in terms of these softwares' expected worldview and
 occasional implementation shortcuts).  Again, more detail is provided
 in the Appendix, but highlights included client software that could
 only handle a very small subset of a protocol's defined status
 message lexicon (e.g., 2 system messages supported), and client
 software that automatically appended additional terms to a query
 specified by the user (e.g., adding "or email=<what the user typed in
 to the query>").

2.4 Some observations

2.4.1 Participation of the WDSPs

 One of the things that came to light was that the nature of the index
 object generated by the WDSPs has an important impact on performance
 -- both in terms of integrating the index object into the Referral
 Index, and in terms of efficiency of handling queries.  A proposal
 might be either to define more clearly how the WDSPs should generate
 the CIP index object (currently left to their discretion), or to
 alert individual WDSPs when their index objects are considered
 substandard.
 On another front, when chaining referrals to WDSP servers, some
 servers perform more efficiently than others, affecting the overall
 response time of the DAG system.  From a service point of view, it
 should also be possible to suggest to WDSP's that are consistently
 slow (longer than some selected response time) that they are
 substandard.

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2.4.2 Index Objects and Referral Index size

 As described in more detail [complex], there are many factors that
 can influence the growth factor of index objects (as more data is
 indexed).  That work dealt specifically with tokenized data for
 Whois++ centroids, and is not immediately generalizable to all forms
 of the Tagged Index Object.  However, the particular structure of the
 TIO used for the TISDAG project is similar enough in structure to a
 centroid that the same "order of magnitude" and growth
 characteristics are applicable.
 Factors that affects the size of the data ("number of entries"):
     .  Number of generated tokens
        The number of tokens generated from the directory data depends
        on what is tokenized. If data is tokenized on names and
        addresses (i.e. not unique data like phone numbers) a rough
        estimation is that the number_of_tokens = 0.2 *
        number_of_data_records. The growth is linear in the span from
        a few thousand to at least 1.2 million records. The growth
        should then level off since the sets of names and addresses
        are finite, but the current tests have not shown a break
        point.
        If data is tokenized on something that is unique, e.g. phone
        numbers, then a rough estimation is that the number_of_tokens
        = number_of_data_records. Note that it is possible to tokenize
        in different ways, for example divide the phone numbers in
        parts. This would result in fewer tokens.
     .  Number of directories
        Since the tokens are generated individually for each
        directory, the data size depends on the number of directories.
        10 directories with 100.000 records will generate the same
        amount of tokens as one directory with 1.000.000 records.

2.4.3 Index Object and Query Performance

 Factors that affects the performance ("queries/second"):
     .  Type of query (exact, substring, etc.)
        A 'substring' query is slower than an 'exact' query due to:
        1) somewhat slower look-up in the internal DAG database than
           an exact query.
        2) Mostly, a larger amount of data is fetched from the
           internal DAG database due to more hits, which generates
           more index processing.

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        3) Substring queries are sent to the directory servers which
           also results in more hits and more data fetched. The
           directory servers may also be more or less effective in
           handling substring queries.
     .  Number of search attributes
        A query with one or few attributes will most of the time
        result in many hits, which results in a lot of data, both
        internally in DAG and from the directory servers. On the other
        hand, a query with many attributes will result in a somewhat
        slower look-up in the internal DAG database.
     .  Number of directories
        A larger number of directories may result in many referrals,
        but it depends on the query. A simple query will generate a
        lot of referrals, which means a lot of data from the
        directories has to be fetched. It will also result in a
        somewhat slower look-up in the internal DAG database.
     .  Number of chained referrals
        Queries that are not chained are faster, since the result data
        does not have to be sent through the DAG system. Chained
        queries to several directories can be processed in parallel in
        the SAPs, but all data has to be processed in the CAP before
        sent to the client.
     .  Response time in the directory servers
        The response time from the directory servers are of course
        critical. The total response time for DAG is never faster than
        the slowest involved directory server.
     .  Number of tokens (size of Tagged Index Objects)
        The number of tokens has little impact on the look-up time in
        the internal DAG database.

2.5 Some evolutions

 To date, the TISDAG project has been "alive" for just over two years.
 During that time, there have been a number of evolutions -- in terms
 of technologies and ideas outside the project (e.g., user and service
 provider expectations, deployment of related software, etc) as well
 as goals and understanding within the scope of the project.
 Chief among these last is the fact that the project set out to
 primarily fulfill the role of a national referral service, and
 gradually evolved towards becoming more of a transparent protocol
 proxy service, fulfilling client queries as completely as possible,
 within the client protocol's semantics.  This evolution was probably

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 provoked by a number of reasons -- existing client & server software
 has a narrower range of accepted (expected) behaviour than their
 protocol specs may describe, once the technology was there for some
 proxying, going all the way seemed to be within reach, etc.
 >From the point of view of providing a national whitepages service,
 this is a very positive evolution.  However, it did place some
 strains on the original system architecture, for which some
 adjustments have been proposed (more detail below).  What is less
 clear is the impact this evolution will have on the flexibility of
 the system architecture -- in terms of addressing other applications,
 different protocols (and protocol paradigms), etc.  That is, the
 original intention of the system was to very simply fulfill an
 unsophisticated role -- "find things that sort of match the input
 query and let the client itself determine if the match is close
 enough".  As the requirements become more sophisticated, the
 simplicity of the system is impacted, and perhaps more brittle.
 (Some proposals for avoiding this are outlined in [DAG++], which
 attempts to return to the underlying principles and propose steps
 forward at that level).
 In terms of impact within the TISDAG project, this evolution lead to
 the following technical adjustments:
     .  The latest version of the technical specification makes a
        distinction (in the internal protocol grammar) between queries
        directed at the Referral Index, and those passed to SAPs to
        fulfill a query.  This distinction keeps the query-routing
        queries simple, but allows more sophistication in expressing a
        query designed to fulfill the client's original semantic
        expression.
     .  The additional constraints in the SAP query language is still
        not enough to allow the internal protocol to express very
        sophisticated queries.  Originally intended only for query-
        routing queries, the DAG/IP expects all queries to be token-
        based (whereas LDAP queries are phrase-oriented).  This means
        that SAPs have to do a good deal of "post-pruning" of WDSP
        result sets to match the DAG/IP query sent by a CAP for query
        fulfillment.  And, CAPs must in turn do more post-pruning to
        match the DAG/IP results (from the SAPs) to the original query
        semantics.
 The real strength of the TISDAG project was that it separated the
 technical framework needed to support the service from the
 configuration required in order to support a particular application
 or service -- query & schema mapping, configuration for protocols,

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 etc.  Future improvements should focus on evolving that framework,
 maintaining the separation from the specific applications, services,
 and protocols that may use it.

3.0 Related Projects

 The TISDAG project is not alone in attempting to solve the problems
 of providing coordinated access to resources managed by multiple,
 disparate services.

3.1 The Norwegian Directory of Directories (NDD)

 Described in [NDD], the Norwegian Directory of Directories project
 also aims to provide necessary infrastructure for a national
 directory service.  It assumes LDAP (v2 or v3) accessibility of WDSP
 information (provided by the WDSP itself, or through other
 arrangements), and aims to resolve some of the trickier issues
 associated with hooking together already-operational LDAP servers
 into a coherent network:  uniform distinguished naming scheme, and
 content-based referrals.  It also addresses some of the pragmatic
 realities of being compatible with different versions of LDAP clients
 -- e.g., v2, which does not support referrals, and v3, which does.
 At the heart of the system is the "Referral Index and Organizational
 information" (RIO) server, which provides a searchable catalogue over
 Norwegian organization. This facilitates the location of whitepages
 servers for individual organizations (assuming the query includes
 information about which organization(s) is(are) interesting).
 This work can be seen as being complementary to the TISDAG work, in
 that it provides a more focused service for integrating LDAP
 directory servers.  However, there is still some requirement that one
 knows the organization to which a person belongs before doing a
 search for their e-mail address. This may be reasonable for seeking
 mail addresses associated with a person's work organization, but is
 less often successful when it comes to finding a personal e-mail
 address -- in an age where ISPs abound, a priori knowledge of a
 user's ISP identification is unlikely.

3.2 DESIRE Directory Services

 The EC funded project DESIRE II (http://www.desire.org) is developing
 a distributed European indexing system for information on Research
 and Education. The Directory Services work undertaken by DANTE and
 SURFnet proposes an architecture applied to a server mesh structure
 to create a wide-area directory service infrastructure.

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 This service is intended to support both whitepages information with
 LDAP servers at WDSPs, as well as a Web-search meshes at various
 places using Whois++ for information about resources and routing of
 queries to other index-based services.
 Like the TISDAG project, the DESIRE directory services project aims
 to act as a focal point for queries, allowing client software to
 access appropriate resources from a wide range of disparate services.
 There are architectural differences between the approach used in the
 TISDAG project and the DESIRE directory service project, but many of
 the driving needs are the same, and the approach of using content-
 based indexing and referrals was also selected.

4.0 Some Directions for TISDAG Next Steps

 The fun thing with technology is that there are always more tweaks
 and changes that can be made.  However, a service should evolve in
 response to specific customer needs, and there are several ways in
 which the TISDAG service itself could advance. Some of them are
 outlined below, in terms of possibilities perceived at this time,
 rather than specific recommendations for underlying technology
 changes that would be necessary to fulfill them.  A related topic,
 networking DAG servers (meshes), is discussed in [DAG-Mesh].

4.1 Security support

 There is a need for security considerations when making use of a
 wide-scaled directory system in other application areas than the
 public white-pages application of the TISDAG project.  There are
 issues whether the directory service is distributed across the
 Internet, or even if it functions completely within an internal,
 closed network.

4.2 WDSPs attributes and schemas

 Today the DAG system makes use of 2 information schemas -- the
 DAGPERSON schema for information about specific people, and the
 DAGORGROLE schema for organizational roles. The technical
 specification includes a definition of the schema, as well as an
 understood mapping to (and from) some standard schemas used in the
 supported protocols.  Nevertheless, to include new WDSPs which may
 not have all attributes in schemas, may use different schemas as well
 as query attributes, it should be possible to provide creation and
 use of new customized/standardized schemas and perform schema mapping
 if it's necessary. It might also be possible to constrain queries to
 desired query attributes, templates, or object classes.

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 In practice, this means that different WDSP's may choose to use
 different subparts of one defined schema, or even implement local
 customizations.

5.0 Some conclusions

 Although fewer people now hold out the hope of a unified global
 directory service, based on standardize protocols,  it is interesting
 to see more projects providing infrastructure that permits unified
 access to what is otherwise an unforgivingly diverse and dislocated
 set of information servers.  What cannot be dictated (in standardized
 protocols and schemas) may yet be accommodated through service
 infrastructure.  The right approach seems to be to build better and
 better frameworks for supporting such diversified services, without
 making the framework architecture dependent on specific technologies.

6.0 Security Considerations

 To date, the TISDAG project has focused on serving only publicly-
 sharable information.  As noted in Section 4.1, any future work will
 have to provide additional facilities for providing authentication,
 authorization, encryption, and otherwise handling sensitive data in
 an open environment.

7.0 Acknowledgements

 This document outlines the perspectives and opinions of the authors,
 based on experience as well as many fruitful and enlightening
 discussions with others:  Roland Hedberg, Torbjorn Granat, Patrik
 Granholm, Rikard Wessblad and Sandro Mazzucato.
 The work described in this document was carried out as part of an
 on-going project of Ericsson.  For further information regarding that
 project, contact:
    Bjorn Larsson
    bjorn.x.larsson@era.ericsson.se

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8.0 Authors' Addresses

 Thommy Eklof
 Hotsip AB
 EMail: thommy.eklof@hotsip.com
 Leslie L. Daigle
 Thinking Cat Enterprises
 EMail:  leslie@thinkingcat.com

9.0 References

 Request For Comments (RFC) and Internet Draft documents are available
 from numerous mirror sites.
 [CIP1]     Allen, J. and M. Mealling, "The Architecture of the Common
            Indexing Protocol (CIP)", RFC 2651, August 1999.
 [CIP2]     Allen, J. and M. Mealling, "MIME Object Definitions for
            the Common Indexing Protocol (CIP)", RFC 2652, August
            1999.
 [CIP3]     Allen, J., Leach, P. and R. Hedberg, "CIP Transport
            Protocols", RFC 2653, August 1999.
 [DAG++]    Daigle, L. and T. Eklof, "An Architecture for Integrated
            Directory Services", RFC 2970, October 2000.
 [DAG-Mesh] Daigle, L. and T. Eklof, "Networking Multiple DAG servers:
            Meshes", RFC 2968, October 2000.
 [TISDAG]   Daigle, L. and R. Hedberg "Technical Infrastructure for
            Swedish Directory Access Gateways (TISDAG)," RFC 2967,
            October 2000.
 [centroid] Deutsch, P., Schoultz, R., Faltstrom, P. and C. Weider,
            "Architecture of the WHOIS++ service", RFC 1835, August
            1995.
 [NDD]      Hedberg, R. and H. Alvestrand, "Technical Specification,
            The Norwegian Directory of Directories (NDD)", Work in
            Progress.

Eklof & Daigle Informational [Page 14] RFC 2969 Wide Area Directory Deployment October 2000

 [TIO]      Hedberg, R., Greenblatt, B., Moats, R. and M. Wahl, "A
            Tagged Index Object for use in the Common Indexing
            Protocol", RFC 2654, August 1999.
 [complex]  P.  Panotzki, "Complexity of the Common Indexing Protocol:
            Predicting Search Times in Index Server Meshes",  Master's
            Thesis, KTH, September 1996.
 [WAP]      The Wireless Application Protocol, http://www.wapforum.org

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Appendix – Specific Software Issues and Deployment Experiences

 The following paragraphs outline practical deployment experiences in
 an anecdotal fashion.  This is not meant to be construed as an
 exhaustive, authoritative evaluation of existing client software, but
 rather an indication of the types of challenges the average
 implementation team may expect to encounter in a development and
 deployment effort.
 Character encoding
 ------------------
 One client's addressbook sends iso-8859 encoding (depending on the
 font configuration in the browser) when querying a directory server
 but the directory server responds with Unicode (UTF-8) encoding.
 This means that the LDAP CAP would have to handle different character
 set encodings for request and response.
 Referrals
 ---------
 Today there appears to be only one commercial addressbook supporting
 LDAPv3.  All the others support only LDAPv2.  However, this LDAPv3
 client software does not handle referrals correctly -- the client
 couldn't handle server the result contains "response code 10"
 (designated for referrals).  From what was observed, there was now
 way for the client or the end-user to decide if, or which, referrals
 to follow-up.   It is therefore not clear how the LDAP clients handle
 a combination of both referrals and results  -- but the supposition
 is that it doesn't work.
 Objectclasses in LDAP
 ---------------------
 No objectclass is defined in the query to the DAG-system from the
 LDAP-clients. This means that the DAG-system doesn't see any
 differences between "inetOrgPerson" and "organisationalRole" when
 attribute "cn" is representing both "name" and "role".  This is not
 so much a problem as that it has interesting side effects.  Namely,
 although most directory user interfaces (found in browsers, mail
 programs) claim only to support person-related queries, in practise a
 user of the client could use the interface to send a query with role
 in the name entry.
 Query with attribute Organisation
 ---------------------------------
 It is possible to send a query with attribute "organisation" but it
 would result in no hits because of that the organisation attribute is
 not included in the objectclass "inetOrgPerson".  Roland Hedberg has
 proposed a change for the latest release of the objectclass
 definition document.

Eklof & Daigle Informational [Page 16] RFC 2969 Wide Area Directory Deployment October 2000

 To provide the desired ability to narrow search focus to some range
 of organization names (attribute values), there are three possible
 approaches with differing merits/detractions:
    Recommend the use of the "locality" attribute -- although a more
    standard definition would be required (locality is currently used
    for everything from organization to county to map coordinates).
    Recommend or require that the attribute organisation should be
    inherited in objectclass "inetOrgPerson".
    Build the LDAP DAG-SAP to submit 2 query to the WDSP. The second
    is the same as the first, with only cn filters if the entire query
    including "o" results in no hits (i.e., back off from the
    organization filtering if it doesn't seem to be supported).
 Configuration
 -------------
 It is not possible to see what character set a LDAP clients want to
 use.  The recommendation so far in he project has been to define a
 unique port for each character set.  This requires extra end-user
 configuration of client software, and proper advertising of the port
 number-charset mapping provided in the service.
 DN
 --
 When the user wants to look-up more information about a person found
 in a preliminary search, the  LDAP client uses the entry's DN
 together with host and port to the DAG system.  Not only does that
 mean that the client submits a non-compliant query to the DAG system,
 as DNs are not part of any of the defined queries for the service, it
 simply does not provide the desired effect of getting to the user's
 entry.
 Response Codes
 --------------
 The LDAPv3 client that was used does not support more than 2 response
 codes -- "success" and "size limit exceeded".  All the other response
 codes are translated to "size limit exceeded", although no results
 are returned.   That is, if the error was in fact that the size limit
 was exceeded, the results up to the size limit are presented.  If it
 was another response code mapped to that one, no results are
 presented.

Eklof & Daigle Informational [Page 17] RFC 2969 Wide Area Directory Deployment October 2000

 Sending and loading CIP Index Objects
 -------------------------------------
 At least one server is quoting the CIP-object incorrectly for the
 Swedish characters A-Ring, A-Umlaut and O-Umlaut.  Sending quoted
 printable CIP-objects with PINE mail software works.
 Source - Labeled URI
 --------------------
 The original plan for the use of the labeled-URI attribute was to use
 it to return a pointer to the WDSP that provided the user
 information.  However, the standard use of the labeled-URI attribute,
 which may in fact be populated in the data returned by a WDSP, is to
 contain the URI for more private related homepages.

Eklof & Daigle Informational [Page 18] RFC 2969 Wide Area Directory Deployment October 2000

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Acknowledgement

 Funding for the RFC Editor function is currently provided by the
 Internet Society.

Eklof & Daigle Informational [Page 19]

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