Re: DNS under o=Internet

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Einar,

>> The allocation of OIDs and NSAPs in any country is likely to be
>> handled under different plans. In Australia, for example, the next
>> portion of the OID for a company is the Australian Company Number.
>> (Note; the SAA, in this case, is acting as a listing authority, not a
>> registration authority.) With NSAPs the SAA are simply keeping a
>> register of companies who have received authority for a portion of the
>> NSAP space, so the SAA are acting as an registration authority.

>Just to clarify -- Do I have this right?  In AU you simply graft the
>AU Company Number Register under your AU DCC (Data Country Code) for
>"automatic" OID use, but require the registered company to also
>register the fact that it intends to use this value in forming NSAP
>addresses, so you are then registering the intended use, rather than
>just the value.  (This is a very subtle distinction!)

Not quite. The bit about OID registration is almost correct. The
only slight correction is that OID allocation is not 'automatic'.
In principle, the SAA still require you to 'register' your usage
of the OID. In practice, of course, there is no reason why you cannot
just use your OID. One complication that I didn't mention is that
company numbers are only allocated to companies. Government and semi
government organisations (like CSIRO) don't have these numbers and
so the SAA has to actually register us and assign us a number. (The
number space is designed to be disjoint.)

NSAPs are completely different. The company numbers (at least six
digits from memory) are too long. In this case the SAA simply keeps
a register of numbers allocated and assigns your organisation the next
number in sequence. (Actually it is slightly more complicated than
that.)

>On this last point, I will only remind that Alphaform Name use, as
>described in the revised ISO 9834, which established { 2 16 }, places
>all the ISO 3166 country names under the X.500 "root", and does not
>(as far as I know) place any other RDN values under the X.500 root.
>
>I think it is proper for someone in this list to dig into ISO 9834 (as
>revised) and dig into the X.500 standards, to help us understand
>exactly who can and does decide what X.500 RDN AVAs can be placed
>under the root.
>
>We keep talking about placing o=INTERNET under the root, as though we
>really have the unilateral right to do this.  Are we just trying to
>finess things by doing it now in our pilots and then claiming some
>kind of grandfather rights when we are challenged when we emerge as
>part of the global public directory system?

Yes, basically I think that we are trying to finess things. This is
probably not as bad as it sounds. The various pilot projects are the
only people with operational experience in running a large distributed
X.500 system. Hopefully, some of this experience will be fed back
into the standards process to round off some of the rough edges in
X.500.

andrew waugh