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, amarine@atlas.arc.nasa.gov. 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 aarn-ds@cc.uq.oz.au. 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: +44 71 405 4222 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: +44 71 405 4222 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: +44 71 405 8400 x432 Fax: +44 71 242 1845 Email: helpdesk@paradise.ulcc.ac.uk 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: For example, send a message to info-server@paradise.ulcc.ac.uk 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 wpp-manager@psi.com 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 wp-info@psi.com 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: (415) 604-0762 EMail: amarine@atlas.arc.nasa.gov This Internet Draft expires December 30, 1993.