Storing Vendor Information in the LDAP root DSE
RFC 3045
Document | Type |
RFC - Informational
(January 2001; No errata)
Was draft-mmeredith-rootdse-vendor-info (individual)
|
|
---|---|---|---|
Author | Mark Meredith | ||
Last updated | 2013-03-02 | ||
Stream | Legacy | ||
Formats | plain text html pdf htmlized bibtex | ||
Stream | Legacy state | (None) | |
Consensus Boilerplate | Unknown | ||
RFC Editor Note | (None) | ||
IESG | IESG state | RFC 3045 (Informational) | |
Telechat date | |||
Responsible AD | (None) | ||
Send notices to | (None) |
Network Working Group M. Meredith Request for Comments: 3045 Novell Inc. Category: Informational January 2001 Storing Vendor Information in the LDAP root DSE Status of this Memo This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. Copyright Notice Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2001). All Rights Reserved. Abstract This document specifies two Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) attributes, vendorName and vendorVersion that MAY be included in the root DSA-specific Entry (DSE) to advertise vendor-specific information. These two attributes supplement the attributes defined in section 3.4 of RFC 2251. The information held in these attributes MAY be used for display and informational purposes and MUST NOT be used for feature advertisement or discovery. Conventions used in this document The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2219] 1. Overview LDAP clients discover server-specific data--such as available controls, extensions, etc.--by reading the root DSE. See section 3.4 of [RFC2251] for details. For display, information, and limited function discovery, it is desirable to be able to query an LDAP server to determine the vendor name of that server and also to see what version of that vendor's code is currently installed. Meredith Informational [Page 1] RFC 3045 LDAP Root DSE to Display Vendor Information January 2001 1.1 Function discovery There are many ways in which a particular version of a vendor's LDAP server implementation may be functionally incomplete, or may contain software anomalies. It is impossible to identify every known shortcoming of an LDAP server with the given set of server data advertisement attributes. Furthermore, often times, the anomalies of an implementation are not found until after the implementation has been distributed, deployed, and is in use. The attributes defined in this document MAY be used by client implementations in order to identify a particular server implementation so that it can 'work around' such anomalies. The attributes defined in this document MUST NOT be used to gather information related to supported features of an LDAP implementation. All LDAP features, mechanisms, and capabilities--if advertised--MUST be advertised through other mechanisms, preferably advertisement mechanisms defined in concert with said features, mechanisms, and capabilities. 2. Attribute Types These attributes are an addition to the Server-specific Data Requirements defined in section 3.4 of [RFC2251]. The associated syntaxes are defined in section 4 of [RFC2252]. Servers MAY restrict access to vendorName or vendorVersion and clients MUST NOT expect these attributes to be available. 2.1 vendorName This attribute contains a single string, which represents the name of the LDAP server implementer. All LDAP server implementations SHOULD maintain a vendorName, which is generally the name of the company that wrote the LDAP Server code like "Novell, Inc." ( 1.3.6.1.1.4 NAME 'vendorName' EQUALITY 1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.109.114.1 SYNTAX 1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.115.121.1.15 SINGLE-VALUE NO-USER-MODIFICATION USAGE dSAOperation ) 2.2 vendorVersion This attribute contains a string which represents the version of the LDAP server implementation. Meredith Informational [Page 2] RFC 3045 LDAP Root DSE to Display Vendor Information January 2001 All LDAP server implementations SHOULD maintain a vendorVersion. Note that this value is typically a release value--comprised of a string and/or a string of numbers--used by the developer of the LDAP server product (as opposed to the supportedLDAPVersion, which specifies the version of the LDAP protocol supported by this server). This is single-valued so that it will only have one version value. This string MUST be unique between two versions, but there are no other syntactic restrictions on the value or the way it is formatted. ( 1.3.6.1.1.5 NAME 'vendorVersion' EQUALITY 1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.109.114.1 SYNTAX 1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.115.121.1.15 SINGLE-VALUE NO-USER-MODIFICATION USAGE dSAOperation ) The intent behind the equality match on vendorVersion is to not allow a less than or greater than type of query. Say release "LDAPv3 8.0" has a problem that is fixed in the next release "LDAPv3 8.5", but in the mean time there is also an update release say version "LDAPv3Show full document text