Deployment of the Internet White Pages Service
RFC 2148
Document | Type |
RFC - Best Current Practice
(September 1997; No errata)
Also known as BCP 15
Was draft-ietf-ids-ds-bcp (ids WG)
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Authors | Harald Alvestrand , Peter Jurg | ||
Last updated | 2013-03-02 | ||
Stream | IETF | ||
Formats | plain text html pdf htmlized bibtex | ||
Stream | WG state | (None) | |
Document shepherd | No shepherd assigned | ||
IESG | IESG state | RFC 2148 (Best Current Practice) | |
Consensus Boilerplate | Unknown | ||
Telechat date | |||
Responsible AD | (None) | ||
Send notices to | (None) |
Network Working Group H. Alvestrand Request for Comments: 2148 UNINETT BCP: 15 P. Jurg Category: Best Current Practice SURFnet September 1997 Deployment of the Internet White Pages Service Status of this Memo This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. 1. Summary and recommendations This document makes the following recommendations for organizations on the Internet: (1) An organization SHOULD publish public E-mail addresses and other public address information about Internet users within their site. (2) Most countries have laws concerning publication of information about persons. Above and beyond these, the organization SHOULD follow the recommendations of [1]. (3) The currently preferable way for publishing the information is by using X.500 as its data structure and naming scheme (defined in [4] and discussed in [3], but some countries use a refinement nationally, like [15] for the US). The organization MAY additionally publish it using additional data structures such as whois++. (4) The organization SHOULD make the published information available to LDAP clients, by allowing LDAP servers access to their data". (5) The organization SHOULD NOT attempt to charge for simple access to the data. In addition, it makes the following recommendations for various and sundry other parties: (1) E-mail vendors SHOULD include LDAP lookup functionality into their products, either as built-in functionality or by providing translation facilities. Alvestrand & Jurg Best Current Practice [Page 1] RFC 2148 Internet White Pages Service September 1997 (2) Internet Service providers SHOULD help smaller organizations follow this recommendation, either by providing services for hosting their data, by helping them find other parties to do so, or by helping them bring their own service on-line. (3) All interested parties SHOULD make sure there exists a core X.500 name space in the world, and that all names in this name space are resolvable. (National name spaces may elobarate on the core name space). The rest of this document is justification and details for this recommendation. The words "SHOULD", "MUST" and "MAY", when written in UPPER CASE, have the meaning defined in RFC 2119 [17] 2. Introduction The Internet is used for information exchange and communication between its users. It can only be effective as such if users are able to find each other's addresses. Therefore the Internet benefits from an adequate White Pages Service, i.e., a directory service offering (Internet) address information related to people and organizations. This document describes the way in which the Internet White Pages Service (from now on abbreviated as IWPS) is best exploited using today's experience, today's protocols, today's products and today's procedures. Experience [2] has shown that a White Pages Service based on self- registration of users or on centralized servers tends to gather data in a haphazard fashion, and, moreover, collects data that ages rapidly and is not kept up to date. The most vital attempts to establish the IWPS are based on models with distributed (local) databases each holding a manageable part of the IWPS information. Such a part mostly consists of all relevant IWPS information from within a particular organization or from within an Internet service provider and its users. On top of the databases there is a directory services protocol that connects them and provides user access. Today X.500 is the most popular directory services protocol on the Internet, connecting the address information of about 1,5 million individuals and 3,000 organizations. Whois++ is the second popular protocol. X.500 and Whois++ may also be used to interconnect other information than only IWPS information, but here we only discuss the IWPS features. Alvestrand & Jurg Best Current Practice [Page 2] RFC 2148 Internet White Pages Service September 1997 Note: there are other, not interconnected, address databases on the Internet that are also very popular for storing address information about people. "Ph" is a popular protocol for use with a stand-alone database. There are over 300 registered Ph databases on theShow full document text