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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.Hawaii.Edu!news.uoregon.edu!Symiserver2.symantec.com!news From: tedm@agora.rdrop.com Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: X.500/LDAP on FreeBSD Date: 17 Oct 1996 06:35:33 GMT Organization: Symantec Corp. Lines: 39 Message-ID: <544k3l$aao@Symiserver2.symantec.com> References: <53ri4c$496@lastactionhero.rs.itd.umich.edu> Reply-To: tedm@agora.rdrop.com NNTP-Posting-Host: shiva4.central.com X-Newsreader: IBM NewsReader/2 v1.2.5 In <53ri4c$496@lastactionhero.rs.itd.umich.edu>, colinj@stimpy.us.itd.umich.edu (Colin Eric Johnson) writes: > My thoughts on this were triggered when I saw mention of long >usernames/loginids in another thread. > > I'm wondering if anyone, in particular any ISPs, are running >X.500 or the UMich LDAP servers? Properly set up this would allow >users to get mail at things like firstname.lastname@isp.net and such >addresses. > My current Computer Bits article is about this, I played a bit with the Umich LDAP server. It was a fairly painless install. I was looking at more for folks to be able to give the LDAP server a piece of a name, or part of a name, and return the complete, accurate user mail address. My feeling is that the server is not "fuzzy" enough in it's searches, you can feed it parts of a name, sometimes it will make a match other times it won't The server's strength is it can feed you the entire directory, and if your willing to point 'n click for a while you can usually dig out what you want to find out. As far as doing what your suggesting, I think you are mistaking LDAP for the database hack/feature in Sendmail that was recently put in. Unless someone created a tremendously complicated script of a program, attempting to use a LDAP server to convert a full username to a partial one would not be possible. While it could be done that's not what the LDAP server is really intended for. There is a way, discussed in the Sendmail distribution, to set up a kind of a database that will convert from firstname_lastname@host to realusername@host. This only works for e-mail. As for X.500, if Netscape, Qualcomm and Novell actually do what they said they would do in April and include LDAP support, we might have some interest. Until then, LDAP is really only going to be useful for specialized applications such as an on-line catalog or some such. Also, the back-end tools in the Umich stuff are all command line, I'd hate to try building anything _large_ with them. Perhaps if someone builds a CGI gateway so a browser can be used to manipulate the database it might be the way to go.