MHS-DS: Directory Support for mapping between X.400 and RFC822 addresses

[Urs Eppenberger <[e-mail]>]

Typos: 
Figure 1 line 14 should probably read ...x400-to-rfc822-...

The last sentence in the last paragraph of chapter 3 shoudl probybly go to
the end of chapter 2 (?)

General:
The distribution of the mapping tables is very dangerous. (Just check a
little bit in the DNS and you will find thousands of wrong entries, especially
for reverse mappings.)
I suggest to modify the proposal to make it possible to introduce the
distributed mappings step by step, for example
1. global mappings at a single point in the DIT
2. mappings split per country and stored at C=xx for each country
3. mappings at the 'natural' place in the DIT
4. speed up the mapping using nonAuthoritativeORAddress attributes

It is not possible to go to step 3 as long as we have table based RFC1327
implementations.

The concept of speeding up the mapping process using nonAuthoritativeORaddress
is a source of inconsistency and wrong configuration. I suggest not to
introduce it until appropriate checking tools are available.


Steve, you face the same problems as I had with my routing document. You 
design a documentation format which supports everything you wanted. But you 
will need to add a considerable amount of text on how to really use it in an 
operational environment.
It is not possible to finalise the definition first and then write the
documents about how to use it. (This error has been made with X.400.) We need
to progress the ideas on how to use it in parallel in order to influence
the storage concept at an early stage. I indeed suggest to slow down the
progress on the 8 documents and introduce a period of let's say 5 month to
do some thinking on how to use it. (I'm a burned child, 80% of the troubles
I had in the last 5 years had their roots in RFC987 and 1148 :-))

Kind regards,

Urs.