Individual Submission to the LDAPExt Working Group Mark Meredith Internet Draft Novell Inc. Document: draft-mmeredith-rootdse-vendor-info-00.txt November 15, 1999 Category: Proposed Standard LDAP Root DSE Vendor Information Status of this Memo This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with all provisions of Section 10 of [RFC2026]. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or made obsolete by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html. Comments and suggestions on this document are encouraged. Comments on this document should be sent to the LDAPEXT working group discussion list ietf-ldapext@netscape.com or the author. 1. Abstract This document specifies two new attributes, vendorName and vendorVersion, that can be included in the root DSE to contain vendor-specific information. 2. Conventions used in this document The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2219] 3. Overview The root DSE query is the mechanism used by clients to find out what controls, extensions, etc. are available from a given LDAP server. It is useful to be able to query an LDAP server to determine the vendor of that server and see what version of that vendorÆs code is currently installed. Since vendors can implement "X-" options for attributes, classes, and syntaxes ( described in section 4 of [RFC2251] and section 4 of [RFC2252] ) that may not be published in the root DSE, this would allow users or applications to be able to determine if these features are available from a given server. M. Meredith Expires May-2000 1 LDAP Root DSE vendor information November 1999 It is also possible for vendors to have an LDAP server implementation to be incomplete in some respect or to have implementation quirks that must be worked around until they can be fixed in the subsequent release. The vendorName and vendorVersion attributes allow client developers to identify a specific implementation of LDAP and work around any shortcomings of that implementation as needed. 4. Vendor specific information This is an addition to the Server-specific Data Requirements defined in section 3.4 of [RFC2251] and the associated syntaxes defined in section 4 of [RFC2252]. - vendorName All LDAP server implementations SHOULD maintain a vendorName, which is generally the name of the company that wrote the LDAP server code, e.g. "Novell, Inc." ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.27.4.43 NAME 'vendorName' SYNTAX 1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.115.121.1.44 NO-USER-MODIFICATION SINGLE-VALUE USAGE dSAOperation ) - vendorVersion All LDAP server implementations SHOULD maintain a vendorVersion, which is the release number of the LDAP server product, (as opposed to the supportedLDAPVersion which specifies the version of the LDAP protocol supported by this server). ( 2.16.840.1.113719.1.27.4.44 NAME 'vendorVersion' SYNTAX 1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.115.121.1.44 NO-USER-MODIFICATION SINGLE-VALUE USAGE dSAOperation ) 5. Notes to Implementers Implementers may want to consider tying the vendorVersion attribute value to the build mechanism so that it is automatically updated when the version number changes. 6. Security Considerations The vendorName and vendorVersion attributes are provided only as an aid to help client implementers assess what features may or may not exist in a given server implementation. Server and application implementers should realize that the existence of a given value in the vendorName or vendorVersion attribute is no guarantee that the server was actually built by the asserted vendor or that its version is the asserted version and should act accordingly. 7. References M. Meredith Expires May-2000 2 LDAP Root DSE vendor information November 1999 RFC2219 Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997 RFC2026 Bradner, S., "The Internet Standards ProcessùRevision 3", BCP 9, RFC 2026, October 1996. RFC2251 Wahl, M., Howes, T., Kille, S., "Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (v3)", RFC 2251, December 1997 RFC2252 Wahl, M., Coulbeck, A., Howes, T., Kille, S., "Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (v3): Attribute Syntax Definitions", RFC 2252, December 1997 8. Acknowledgments The author would like to thank the generous input and review by individuals at Novell including but not limited to Jim Sermersheim, Mark Hinckley, Renea Campbell, and Roger Harrison. 9. Author's Addresses Mark Meredith Novell Inc. 122 E. 1700 S. Provo, UT 84606 Phone: +1 801 861 2645 Email: mark_meredith@novell.com Full Copyright Statement Copyright (c) The Internet Society (1999). All Rights Reserved. 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This document and the information contained herein is provided on an "AS IS" basis and THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND THE INTERNET ENGINEERING TASK FORCE DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF THE INFORMATION HEREIN WILL NOT M. Meredith Expires May-2000 3 LDAP Root DSE vendor information November 1999 INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MER-CHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. M. Meredith Expires May-2000 4