Network Working Group The North American Directory Forum Request for Comments: 1758 February 1995 Obsoletes: 1417, 1295, 1255, 1218 Category: InformationalNADF Standing Documents: A Brief Overview
1. Introduction
The North American Directory Forum (NADF) is a collection of service providers which plans to cooperatively offer a Public Directory Service in North America using the CCITT X.500 Recommendations. Although many groups are working on realizing X.500, the NADF is unique in that it must achieve a cooperative service offered by competing providers.
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RFC 1758 NADF Standing Documents February 1995
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SD-0 NADF Standing Documents: A Brief Overview
SD-1 Terms of Reference SD-2 Program Plan SD-3 Service Description SD-4 The Directory Schema SD-5 An X.500 Naming Scheme for National DIT Subtrees
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RFC 1758 NADF Standing Documents February 1995
SD-7 contains agreements concerning how the DIT is mapped onto multiple DMDs. Knowledge maintenance procedures are absent from X.500(88), and products which support X.500(92) are years away. Further, the competitive relationships between the North American Directory providers invalidate any possibility of a single entity having exclusive management rights to the public name-space. The NADF approach is to cooperatively manage the public name-space by allowing each service provider to provide linkage from the public name-space into their own private name-space. This information is limited to knowledge references and naming links; there is little, if any, payload present. SD-9 discusses how a central authority (termed the CAN) coordinates and disseminates this information. In effect, the CAN publishes a roadmap for North American Public Directory Service.
1.1. Document Availability
At the present time, the NADF standing documents are available only in hardcopy and PostScript form. Since they do not exist in ASCII form, the NADF standing documents can not be distributed as informational RFCs. Following are the various distribution mechanisms available.
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RFC 1758 NADF Standing Documents February 1995 1.1.1. HardcopyPostal: NADF Secretariat
1.1.2. Anonymous FTP
host: ftp.gte.com area: /pub/nadf/nadf-docs files: sd-*.ps mode: ascii