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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!howland.erols.net!news.sprintlink.net!news-peer.sprintlink.net!uunet!news-in2.uu.net!news.sandia.gov!tesuque.cs.sandia.gov!lynx.unm.edu!math.math.unm.edu!colinj From: colinj@math.math.unm.edu (Colin Eric Johnson) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: X.500/LDAP on FreeBSD Date: 20 Oct 1996 04:47:42 GMT Organization: Dept. of Math & Stat, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque Lines: 80 Message-ID: <54cate$cnr@lynx.unm.edu> References: <53ri4c$496@lastactionhero.rs.itd.umich.edu> <544k3l$aao@Symiserver2.symantec.com> Reply-To: Colin E. Johnson <colinj@unm.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: math.math.unm.edu In article <544k3l$aao@Symiserver2.symantec.com>, <tedm@agora.rdrop.com> wrote: >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. I've found that even a partial name search would narrow the list to a manageable amount, unless I was looking for a very common name like Bob or Johnson. I know that searches for Colin are pretty successful ;-). How might this be made more "fuzzy" to allow for better searches? Or do you mean that if I was looking for myself but couldn't remember if my last name was Johnson or Johnston that a search for Colin John* might be tough to narrow? This could be improved. > >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. Actually the mail500 portion of the LDAP work that was done at UMich allows for just this. Mail coming into UMich can be sent to Colin_Eric_Johnson@umich.edu (as well as Colin_E_Johnson, Colin_Johnson, and at least one other permutation of my name). This would allow users to have email addresses that were their full names and even portions of their full names. This does require that in the database the users have listed a mailbox that the machine running LDAP can deliver to. This would be trivial for an ISP to implement since they would know where the user was receiving mail and what the users full name was. As an example try finger colinj@umich.edu, that should give you a fair amount of information about how to send mail to me. Having just tried it would seem that colin.johnson won't work since there are now two listed in the database, however colin.e.johnson will. It does lengthen peoples email addresses but then full names might be easier for folks to remember. >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. I know that part of the design was intended to facilitate searching for things other then just people. You could, for example, put pointers to documentation that is available on-line in the database and allow users to search that via a client on there machine, there are clients for Macs, Windows and X so just about all of the bases are covered. And with these clients users can edit their own entries which would be a fairly big win as well, properly managed. I won't argue that the database itself is the hardest part to create. But then isn't that always the case? -- "Now my life is better than an ABBA song" - Muriel, "Muriel's Wedding" Colin E. Johnson | colinj@unm.edu | http://www.unm.edu/~colinj/ NeXTMail, MIMEmail, Textmail, send it all, I'm easy.