Internet Info 1994 March/Internet Info CD-ROM (Walnut Creek) (March 1994).iso/inet/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-ids-pilots-00.txt

Text File | 1993-06-16 | 12KB | 349 lines

INTERNET-DRAFT                                                 A. Marine
DISI/IDS WG                                                    NASA NAIC
Expires:  December 30, 1993                                    June 1993


                           X.500 Pilot Projects


Status of This Memo


This document is an Internet-Draft.  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.  Internet-Drafts may be
updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time.  It is
not appropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to
cite them other than as a "working draft" or "work in progress."

Send comments to April Marine, [e-mail].


Abstract

This document lets people know about three significant
X.500-based white pages projects.  Each pilot is described
briefly, then basic information is provided about how an
organization may participate in the pilot and where they
should ask for more details.


Introduction

This document is the result of work done in the Directory
Information Services Infrastructure (DISI) working group
of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).  Since
the assignment of this paper, the work of the DISI group
has been folded into the Integrated Directory Services (IDS)
working group.

A "white pages" directory generally lists information
about users, such as where they work, their electronic
mail addresses, and their phone numbers.  The X.500
protocol is the OSI standard for providing such a
directory service.  In the X.500 model, information is
supplied by one or more servers, called Directory System
Agents (DSAs) to clients called Directory User Agents
(DUAs), which act on behalf of users.  Although
information may be distributed among many DSAs, they work
together to provide a single transparent view of the
directory to DUAs.

If you would like more general information about X.500, we
suggest you refer to FYI 13, "Executive Introduction to
Directory Services Using the X.500 Protocol" or FYI 14,
"Technical Overview of Directory Services Using the X.500
Protocol."


Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the following extremely helpful
people: Mark Prior (University of Adelaide), Wengyik
Yeong (PSI), David Goodman (PARADISE), and Tim Howes
(University of Michigan).



The Pilots

The three pilots described are the AARNet Directory Services
Project, the PARADISE project, and the PSINet White Pages
project.  Information for each pilot is provided in three
sections: Background, Participation, and More Information.


1. AARNnet Directory Services Project

--Background

The Australian Academic Research Network (AARNet)
Directory Services Project was funded for one year (1991)
by AARNet to report on whether it was feasible, at that
time, to implement a nationwide directory service. The
project partners were CSIRO Division of Information
Technology, Monash University, the Universities of
Adelaide, Queensland, and Sydney.

Although the project members chose not to recommend full
scale nationwide implementation, at that time, a number
of other institutions have subsequently started running
their own directories as part of this "project".

The project uses the Quipu implementation exclusively,
although some interoperability testing with at least one
other product developed in Australia is being attempted.
There are 25 DSAs running in Australia that contain basic
information about all AARNet organizations loaded in the DIT
(those sites running their own DSA have more information
available) with just over 42,000 entries.

--Participation

Any AARNet member or network affiliate member is welcome
to join the project.  To aid this process, binary kits for
a number of popular platforms are provided.  These kits
are available for ftp on the host archie.au, as is the
ISODE source distribution.  At present, connectivity is
offered only via TCP/IP or X.25, but once the AARNet
backbone supports TP4/CLNS, connections via native OSI
will be possible.


--More Information

Initial information is available from the project report
submitted to the funders of AARNet.  This report is available for
anonymous ftp on the host archie.au in the subdirectory
/projects/directory-services/report.

Although the project was only funded for one year by
AARNet the members of the team are willing to assist
others wishing to join the "project" and they can be
contacted via the mailing list [e-mail]. Also
there are a number of Australia-wide newsgroups for
discussion of the Directory.

Users are able to access the AARNet Directory
as follows:

     Internet:
        archie.au               type de at the login prompt
        wp.adelaide.edu.au      type de or fred at the login prompt
        wp.monash.edu.au        type fred at the login prompt
        jethro.ucc.su.oz.au     type fred at the login prompt

     Gopher:
        wp.adelaide.edu.au      port 7777


2. PARADISE Project

The PARADISE project was originally funded by the COSINE
project which finished on 31 December 1992, and is now
financed through the European Commission's VALUE programme
from 1 January 1993 through 30 April 1994.  The role of
PARADISE (Piloting A ReseArcher's DIrectory Service for
Europe) is to provide the technical co-ordination of
international X.500 pilot activities with the focus being
the promotion and support of the national pilots in Europe.
The goal of the current PARADISE Transition Phase is to
help migrate X.500 to a self-supporting service for the
research community in Europe.  The pilot is committed to
a long term heterogenous, multi-service provider and multi-
implementation X.500 environment.  There is a close
liaison with the activities of X.500 vendors, as well as the
proposed European PTO pilot and the NADF.

The participants in the project are:
    - RARE. Amsterdam
    - UCL, University College London
    - ULCC, University of London Computer Centre
    - Nexor Ltd, previously X-Tel Services Ltd
    - INRIA, Paris

--Participation

Connection through the PARADISE central DSA to the
international pilot is open to any country pilot.
To participate at the country level a pilot is
expected to have both X.25 over PSPDN and the
Internet (using RFC-1006 over TCP/IP.  To some
extent, PARADISE acts on a first come, first served
basis, but in case of conflict (whcih is very rare),
the decision as to who will act as a country's first
level DSA is seen as a national matter.  It is
anticipated that long term this barrier will be
resolved.

Users are able to access the PARADISE Directory
Enquiries, with an introduction to the international
X.500 pilot, as follows:

Internet:
   128.86.8.56             type dua at the login: prompt
   paradise.ulcc.ac.uk   type dua at the login: prompt

PSS:
   234219200114853     no login required

IXI:
   20433450400253     no login required

Dial-up:
   [phone]     type LONDIAL at the first prompt
             type DIRECT- at the second prompt
             type call de to access Directory Enquiries


Users wishing to manage their own Directory accounts
and/or add their organisation into the Directory may
also use the PARADISE Interactive Directory Manager:

Internet:
   128.86.8.56           type idm at the login: prompt
   paradise.ulcc.ac.uk   type idm at the login: prompt

PSS:
   234219200114852       no login required

IXI:
   20433450400252        no login required

Dial-up:
   [phone]       type LONDIAL at the first prompt
                         type DIRECT- at the second prompt
                         type call idm to access the
                         Interactive Directory Manager

--More Information

The best first source of information about the PARADISE pilot is
the PARADISE HelpDesk.

PARADISE HelpDesk:

     Telephone: [phone] x432
     Fax:       [phone]
     Email:     [e-mail]

The HelpDesk will be staffed during office hours 9:00-5:00, UK time.

In addition, PARADISE informational documents are available online
from the electronic mail info-server.

Documents are available from the info-server using a request in the
form:
     request:  paradise
     topic:    <a topic>

For example, send a message to [e-mail]
with the body of the message in the form:
     request:  paradise
     topic:    index.txt
     topic:    userguide.ps
     request:  end

This request will return you an index of documents available
about PARADISE, and the postscript file "Introduction to
PARADISE Services".



3. PSI White Pages Pilot

--Background

In July of 1989, the NYSERNet network sponsored a White
Pages Pilot Project.  This service, the largest pilot
project to use the OSI Directory standard (X.500), is now
available throughout PSINet.

Participation in the White Pages project is strictly
voluntary.  The project is a grass roots effort, both to
understand the white pages service desired by users and to
understand the limitations of the OSI Directory in providing
those services.

The primary goal of the project is to encourage
organizations to use the OSI Directory to store
infrastructural information about their personnel.  In
addition, organizations are encouraged to maintain their own
portion of the Directory tree.  For resource constrained
members of PSINet, PSI will offer maintenance service just
as it does for the Domain Name System (DNS).  Another goal
of the Pilot Project is to use the same programs and tools
to access both global and local white pages information.  As
a part of this, new applications which might make use of the
White Pages service, such as private mail, will be
encouraged.


--Participation

Anyone in the US can participate in this pilot.  Those
people outside the US should contact the organization that
runs that country's national node.  There are two
requirements for U.S. site participation: full IP connectivity
and an (informal) commitment on the part of the organization
to devote personnel resources to running the local server
and keeping the data current.

Each participating organization must run a DSA.  each
participating organization should also provide DUA access
to its users, although PSI maintains two service hosts
which allow anonymous DUA access: wp.psi.net and
wp2.psi.net.  To access the service, simply telnet to one
of these hosts and login as "fred".

For U.S. sites to participate in the service, the site must have
IP-connectivity.  (The pilot can't deal with X.25-only and
CLNP-only DSAs, due to a lack of resources to run the
necessary transport bridges.)

PSI provides, free of charge, the software that is run at
each participating site.  For more information, use
anonymous ftp to ftp.psi.com and retrieve the file
wp/src/pilot-ps.tar.Z in BINARY mode.  After uncompressing
and untaring this file, several PostScript files will be
present containing an Administrators' Guide and Users'
Manual.  The Administrators' Guide contains instructions on
how to retrieve the software and then build, install, and
configure the system.

After you have done this, you will need to contact
[e-mail] to connect your DSA to the pilot.


--More Information

The WPP pilot provides information via automatic replies
when you send to a series of email addresses.  To start
along the short, informative path, send email to
[e-mail] for an overview of the project.  Information
is also available online from the host uu.psi.com in
the "wp" directory.  Get the README file first.


Security Considerations

Security considerations are not discussed in this document.


Author's Address

  April N. Marine
  NASA Network Applications and Information Center
  Ames Research Center
  M/S 233-18
  Moffett Field, CA  94035-1000

  Phone: [phone]
  EMail: [e-mail]

This Internet Draft expires December 30, 1993.