Re: Status of LDAP

Tim Howes <tim@terminator.rs.itd.umich.edu> Tue, 27 July 1993 20:12 UTC

Message-Id: <9307271931.AA10765@terminator.rs.itd.umich.edu>
To: Christian Huitema <Christian.Huitema@sophia.inria.fr>
Cc: osi-ds@cs.ucl.ac.uk
Subject: Re: Status of LDAP
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 26 Jul 93 16:11:14 +0200." <199307261411.AA18680@mitsou.inria.fr>
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 93 15:31:07 -0400
Sender: ietf-archive-request@IETF.CNRI.Reston.VA.US
From: Tim Howes <tim@terminator.rs.itd.umich.edu>

> From:    Christian Huitema <Christian.Huitema@sophia.inria.fr>
> To:      tim@terminator.rs.itd.umich.edu

> I am preparing a course on name services (X.500 and friends) and am currently
> writing a section on LDAP. I have a couple of questions:
> 
> 1) I am currently using the internet draft:
> 		draft-ietf-osids-lightdirect-03.txt
> This draft does not carry the regular "date" and "expires" indications in the
> header -- but page footings mention "Expires 6/15/93". Where is the valid
> version?

I've submitted it to Joyce and Jon.  I don't know why it hasn't found
its way into the various internet draft areas.  I'll see about getting
the latest versions up on the osi-ds archive at least.

> 2) Various minor bugs in the draft:
> 
> 	Page 3: Comma missing after:
> 		unbindRequest       UnbindRequest
> 
> 	Page 3: IA5String ::= OCTET STRING
> 	should be LDAPString or something similar, NOT "IA5String" which is an
> 	ASN1 reserved key word.

Fixed.

> 3) We beated at length the Search vs Read vs List issue. How come that LDAP
> still includes a "Compare" operation? I could have thought that "Search,
> scope=baseobject, filter=assertion" would do the trick...

The only problem with doing it this way is that you can't tell the
difference between "compare false" and "attribute does not exist",
which is useful in some circumstances.

> 4) Mandating the definite form of ASN.1/BER is **NOT** a simplification. Is
> this just a a leftover from SNMP?

It's only a simplification in that implementors only have to handle
one way of doing things instead of two.

> 5) How many implementations of LDAP do we count today?

There is the full implementation from U-M.  Many places have taken this
and are building clients around it.  I've heard talk from some other
folks about other server/library implementations, but so far have not
seen anything.                                               -- Tim

Status of LDAP Christian Huitema
Re: Status of LDAP Tim Howes