OSI-Directory Services Working Group Chris Weider Internet Draft Mark Knopper (Merit Network) Ruth Lang (SRI) April 1991 Interim Directory Tree Structure for Network Infrastructure Information Status of this Memo As work progresses on incorporating WHOIS and Network Infrastructure infor- mation into X.500, we thought it would be useful to document the current DIT structure for this information, along with some thoughts on future expansion and organization of this subtree of the DIT. The first section of this document describes the current structure, the second section the possible expansion of the structure. This draft document will be submitted to the RFC editor as an informational document. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. Please send comments to the authors or to the discussion group osi-ds@cs.ucl.ac.uk. INTERNET--DRAFT Interim DIT for Net Infrastructure Info April 1991 SECTION 1: CURRENT DIT ORGANIZATION 1.1 Current DIT organization All Internet-specific information contained in the Directory resides under the subtree @o=Internet. This subtree resides directly under the root of the DIT, as the Internet is not confined to one country nor to one corporate entity. This subtree presently contains three branches: "ou=Site Contacts", "cn=FYI Documents", and "cn=RFC Documents". 1.2 ou=Site Contacts The ou=Site Contacts branch contains Network Infrastructure information specific to the IP portion of the Internet. This information includes contact information for each IP network and Autonomous System registered with the NIC. The schema for this information are described in [Weid91]. An RDN for a siteContact for a given network would be "@o=Internet@ou=Site Contacts@ipNetworkNumber=35", while an RDN for an asSiteContact would be "@o=Internet@ou=Site Contacts@asNumber=267". The Site Contacts portion is updated regularly and is used by the NSFNet NOC. Currently it holds the set of approximately 20,000 network numbers which have been assigned by the NIC, although the number of EDB entries is on the order of 2,500 because the networks with unconnected status have been allocated in large contiguous blocks, and each block is stored in a single EDB entry with a multi-valued RDN for searching purposes. It also holds the >1000 assigned Autonomous System numbers. The structure of the Site Contacts is essentially flat, i.e., each network and AS number resides directly under the ou=Site Contacts entry, with no heirarchy. This flat organization does not scale well for a large number of networks. We will address this problem in section 2. 1.3 cn=FYI Documents The cn=FYI Documents branch contains a single entry which tells users how to obtain FYI documents. The FYI documents are available for anonymous FTP from nic.ddn.mil. 1.4 cn=RFC Documents The cn=RFC Documents branch contains a single entry which tells users how to obtain RFC documents. These documents are available for anonymous FTP from nic.ddn.mil. INTERNET--DRAFT Interim DIT for Net Infrastructure Info April 1991 SECTION 2: DEFICIENCIES AND SOLUTIONS IN THE CURRENT DIT STRUCTURE 2.1 Deficiencies with the current DIT structure As noted above, the ou=Site Contacts branch of the DIT contains approximately 2,500 entries with no further heirarchy. This flat organization will not scale well when we have 25,000 or 250,000 networks and ASes for which we will need to keep site contact information. Searching and replication for such a large level will be quite unmanageable. Another problem is that variable access control is not used which means that the contact people may not update their own information. The information remains under control of a central organization (still the NIC since MERIT downloads their file into the X.500 directory regularly). Yet another problem is that the personal information on the contacts is stored separately in Site Contacts even in the case where the person's organization has an entry for her in their White Pages project DSA. Finally, as more Network Infrastructure and WHOIS infor- mation is incorporated into the DSA, much more revision will have to be done to get a good mix of elegance and functionality. 2.2 Solutions to the deficiencies Several useful suggestions have been proposed by IEFT OSI-DS members. Ignoring the number of networks problem for a moment, it would seem useful to allow pointers to additional information in other parts of the global DIT whenever available. If an organization is a functioning participant in a White Pages Project, it would make sense to allow that organization to register and maintain their own entry in their DIT for contact and technical data on that network. It will probably make sense to allocate blocks of network numbers to regional authorities such as the US mid-level networks or European networking agnecies. These activities can be done soon to allow the distributed aspects of X.500 to be enjoyed right away. All that is necessary is for the reliability of the various DSAs to be improved. Another suggestion for the network number organization was given in the "Domains and X.500" Internet Draft [Kil89]. He compares the problem of representing network number information to the in-addr domain in the DNS. In that paper it is proposed to represent mailbox and domain-related-object information in X.500, and network information could be added in to this activity. This work has begun on an experimental basis, allowing browsing through the DNS information for example. It will require experimentation and a much more complete population of the directory entries before this can be used successfully for a site contact information. The UCL staff are looking into this. INTERNET--DRAFT Interim DIT for Net Infrastructure Info April 1991 SECTION 3: POSSIBILITIES FOR FUTURE DIT STRUCTURE 3.1 Information included by May 1992 There is much more Network Infrastructure Information to be included in X.500 before May 1992. This information includes a much fuller population of the WHOIS information, and Internet topology information. The work on both of these types of information is in progress, but a brief sketch of the structure will be useful here. 3.1.1 WHOIS information The WHOIS information will consist of 7 new "entities", realized as X.500 schema. They are: Individual Computer Network Domain Autonomous System Organization Group A fuller exposition of these entities is in [Ruth, Your Paper Here!] Much of the Network Infrastructure information currently in o=Internet will be contained in this set. 3.1.2 Internet topology information There are four new types of network topology information to be included. These will include: Node/NSS (publicly available information about NSSs) AD - regional networks networks Hosts A fuller exposition of these entities is in Knopper and Weider [Weid91/2] (in progress). There will also be two additional new schema for routing and net-path policy information. 3.2 New DIT structures for this information The DIT under o=Internet will need to be revised to include this information. One scheme would be to remove the o=Internet@ou=Site Contacts branch of the DIT and replace it with "o=Internet@ou=WHOIS" for the WHOIS information, "o=Internet@ou=topology" for the new topology information, and "o=Internet@ou= NSFNet routing" for the NSFNet routing information. It is expected that the organization of "o=Internet@ou=topology" will be rather simple and will not be overpopulated. The "o=Internet@ou=NSFNet routing" will be as populated as the current Site Contacts branch, but the schema for each network and AS will be quite different. This will also require the same solutions used for the current Site Contacts directory. The "o=Internet@ou= WHOIS" will be very heavily populated, and will require many clever tricks to avoid excessive depth and excessive fanout. INTERNET--DRAFT Interim DIT for Net Infrastructure Info April 1991 As X.500 usage increases and more and more organizations start running their own DSAs, the structures for the WHOIS portion of this tree will probably fade away. One hopes that eventually all Internet-related information will be kept on line in a distributed fashion, to circumvent the problems attendant to centralized administration and to improve access and reliability. SECTION 4: WHO WE ARE 4.1 Author's addresses Chris Weider, clw@merit.edu Mark Knopper, mak@merit.edu Merit Network, Inc. 1075 Beal Avenue Ann Arbor, MI 48109 (313) 936-2090 (Chris) (313) 763-6061 (Mark) Ruth, put your information here...... SECTION 5: REFERENCES [Kil89] S.E. Kille. X.500 and domains. Research Note RN/89/47, Department of Computer Science, University College Lon- don, May 1989. Also Internet Draft: DRAFT-UCL-KILLE- X500DOMAINS-00.PS Ruth put your reference here..... [Weid91] Mark Knopper and Chris Weider. Interim Schema for Network Infra- structure Information in X.500, Internet Draft. [Weid2:91] Mark Knopper and Chris Weider. Schema for Network Topology Infrastructure Information in X.500, in progress.