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List:       namedroppers
Subject:    deploying directories (fwd)
From:       Martin Hamilton <martin () mrrl ! lut ! ac ! uk>
Date:       1995-12-19 0:13:37
[Download RAW message or body]

[apologies to anyone who's seen this already!]

This isn't strictly DNS related, but it would seem to have some
relevance to the DNS...  By adding an extra layer of indirection,
it becomes less attractive to use the DNS as a directory service.
Why try and remember _exactly_ the URL printed in an advert when
you could type in some variant of the company's name and get
straight to their Web server ?

There might even be a long term solution to .com here - if the
domain name of the server doesn't need to be shown to end users,
the incentive to register in .com is removed.  Distributed
indexing (centroids/CIP) makes it possible to search across the
data held in multiple servers without hitting each server in
turn.  We also have a handy way of locating White/Yellow Pages
servers for organizations, and I guess for naming authorities in
URN-like schemes, but that's another mailing list... ;-)

Phew!

This message is to appeal for some volunteers to try this stuff
out in practice.  Since generating those WHOIS++ templates for
.uk mentioned in the message below, I've tweaked the conversion
script so that it works on the whole Netfind seed database, and
generates the templates associated with each top-level domain.
You can pick these up from the "templates" sub-directory.  To
add index them with Digger, just type "digger_insert" and the
filename


------- Forwarded Message

From: Martin Hamilton <martin@mrrl.lut.ac.uk>
To: ietf@CNRI.Reston.VA.US
Subject: deploying directories
Date: Thu, 14 Dec 1995 19:43:04 +0000

In case anyone's interested...

I was wondering how difficult it would be to set up the sort of
distributed directory of (just!) organization & domain name info
people have been talking about on this list recently

We already run a few WHOIS++ servers and a Netfind server, so I
followed the lazy approach of snarfing the .uk data out of the
Netfind seed database and loading it into a WHOIS++ server.  OK,
it's not exactly high quality information, but the idea is to
get something up and running...!  The server's on port 6663 of
egate.lut.ac.uk [158.125.1.102].  It's "experimental", but I'll
try to keep it running all the time

My conversion script and before and after versions of the UK
data can be found at...

  <URL:http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk/~martin/wip/simple-directory/>

The script has the odd UK-specific bit, but should only require
minor tweaking to behave sensibly with other countries' data

Now, it would be fun to get a few servers running elsewhere with
this sort of info for their countries/domains, and link the lot
together in a centroid mesh.  We could try this sort of thing
out with other technologies too, e.g. RWHOIS and stand-alone
LDAP ?  The Digger server from Bunyip and the Netfind seed
database are freely available, by the way [1,2]

If you're interested in doing some hacking on this stuff, and
maybe running a server - join the "deploy" mailing list by
sending a message to "deploy-request@mrrl.lut.ac.uk", with the
word "subscribe" on its own in the message body

Cheerio,

Martin

[1] http://services.bunyip.com:8000/products/digger/
[2] ftp://ftp.cs.colorado.edu/pub/cs/distribs/netfind

PS Here's a couple of sample searches to show the sort of thing
you get out of my server.  This is using the Digger server and
Jeff Allen's TTY based WHOIS++ client, by the way ...

  % wpp -s egate.lut.ac.uk:6663 -f turing -q 
  Initial server-id's are now:
          158.125.1.102:6663
  Whois++ Client Library Demo Client * (2.0b) 
  
  Template-type:            ORGANIZATION
  Handle:                   LUTACUK08:TURINGACUK
  ORGANIZATION-NAME:        the turing institute, glasgow, scotland
  ORGANIZATION-TYPE:        Higher Education / Research
  ORGANIZATION-COUNTRY:     United Kingdom
  ORGANIZATION-EMAIL:       turing.ac.uk
  wpp shutting down...

  % wpp -s egate.lut.ac.uk:6663 -f blackwell.co.uk -q
  Initial server-id's are now:
          158.125.1.102:6663
  Whois++ Client Library Demo Client * (2.0b) 
  
  Template-type:            ORGANIZATION
  Handle:                   LUTACUK08:BLACKWELLCOUK
  ORGANIZATION-NAME:        b h blackwell limited, oxford
  ORGANIZATION-TYPE:        Commercial
  ORGANIZATION-COUNTRY:     United Kingdom
  ORGANIZATION-EMAIL:       blackwell.co.uk
  wpp shutting down...

------- End of Forwarded Message

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