Re: people CN

[Andrew Waugh <[e-mail]>]

> thanks for your fast comments

You're welcome, it helps being 9 hours in front of GMT!

> your solution is nice,
> and I see the advantages for human user
> behind a DUA, however my concern is based on the assumption
> that 95% of the request will be of name-server query types
> (such as looking for my X.400 ORaddress, or prefered MTA,
> or any user preference that might influence some
> external software behaviour).
> thus my preference for any solution which works as often
> as possible with a DN as simple as possible (even if
> not directly user-friendly).

> I need a user to be able to "guess" who it is when
> presented a DN, but I need badly any user be able
> to give a simple DN for X.400 and have the MHS service
> do the queries without any further user intervention.

You should think very carefully about what you want and what you are
doing! What you want is that the user can enter a DN which then
gets mapped to an O/R address. The problem is that if two people have
very similar DNs (as a result of the same name and a simple
disambiguating algorithm) it is very likely that the
WRONG O/R address will be returned. Since this is being handled
'automatically' the mail will then be sent to the wrong person! This
could be very embarassing if the mail is sensitive for some reason.

(Note that this problem could also occur if the DNs are similar,
but not identical.)

For such applications, you don't just need the DNs to be unique,
you need them to be very different. (Technically, the DNs need to
have a large hamming distance.)

> Another point is that with a DUA like Paradise "de",
> as long as there is within the entry one value of the CN
> which match the "usual persone name", you would not be
> cross (and even hardly notice) that the CN is
> 	"Paul-Andre Pays 01" and not "Paul-Andre Pays"

Many DUAs display the contents of the RDN as they _assume_ that
the CN in the RDN is the preferred value.

> Though, I dislike using the description, and  then
> would recomment to use OrganizationalRole attribute
> for such a purpose.

Fine!

(We can use then use descriptions for descriptions... I can
just see my entry:
	
description= Average height, blue eyes, mousy brown hair and a beard

(:-))

andrew