don provan INTERNET-DRAFT Novell, Inc. 13 November 1996 Expires 18 May 1997 DHCP Options for Novell Directory Services draft-provan-dhcp-options-dir-serv-00.txt Status of this Memo This document is an Internet-Draft. 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 obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is not appropriate to use Internet Drafts as reference material, or to cite them other than as a ``working draft'' or ``work in progress.'' To learn the current status of any Internet-Draft, please check the ``1id-abstracts.txt'' listing contained in the internet-drafts Shadow Directories on ds.internic.net (US East Coast), nic.nordu.net (Europe), ftp.isi.edu (US West Coast), or munnari.oz.au (Pacific Rim). Abstract This document defines three new DHCP options for delivering configuration information to clients of the Novell Directory Services. The first option carries a list of NDS servers. The second option carries the name of the client's NDS tree. The third carries the initial NDS context. These three options provide an NDS client with enough information to connect to an NDS tree without manual configuration of the client. 1. Introduction Novell Directory Services is a distributed, replicated, hierarchical database of objects representing network resources such as nodes, services, users, and applications. An NDS client must be able to locate an NDS server in order to authenticate itself to the network and gain access to the database. In addition, the node's user is better served if the NDS client's attention is focused on the area of the NDS database likely to be of the most interest to the user. Provan Expires 18 May 1997 [Page 1] INTERNET-DRAFT DHCP Options for NDS 13 November 1996 This specification describes DHCP options [1] that carry NDS information to TCP/IP clients of NDS. The first option, the NDS Servers option, carries a list of NDS servers. The other two options, the NDS Tree Name option and the NDS Context option, provide the client with a default context within the NDS database. 2. NDS Servers Option This option specifies one or more NDS servers for the client to contact for access to the NDS database. Servers SHOULD be listed in order of preference. The code for this option is 85. The minimum length of this option is 4 octets, and the length MUST be a multiple of 4. Code Len Address 1 Address 2 +-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-- | 85 | n | a1 | a2 | a3 | a4 | a1 | a2 | a3 | a4 | ... +-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-- 3. NDS Tree Name Option This option specifies the name of the NDS tree the client will be contacting. The tree name is formatted as a string of 16-bit Unicode characters, with each Unicode character transmitted in network order (most significant byte first). The code for this option is 86. Current implementations of NDS limit tree names to 32 Unicode characters (64 bytes), but implementations of this option are encouraged to support the maximum possible length for the option: 254 bytes. The length MUST be a multiple of 2. Code Len NDS Tree Name +----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-- | 86 | n | uc1 | uc2 | uc3 | ... +----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-- 4. NDS Context Option This option specifies the initial NDS context the client should use. The context is formatted as a string of 16-bit Unicode characters, with each Unicode character transmitted in network order (most significant byte first). A single DHCP option can only contain 127 Unicode characters. Since an NDS context name can be longer than that, this option can appear more than once in the DHCP packet. The contents of all NDS Context options in the packet should be concatenated as suggested in the DHCP specification [2, page 23] to get the complete NDS context. Provan Expires 18 May 1997 [Page 2] INTERNET-DRAFT DHCP Options for NDS 13 November 1996 The code for this option is 87. The length of each individual context option MUST be a multiple of 2. The maximum length for each instance is 254, but, as just described, the option may appear more than once if the desired NDS context is longer than 127 Unicode characters. Current implementations of NDS limit contexts to 256 Unicode characters (512 bytes), but implementations are discouraged from enforcing any specific maximum to the final concatenated NDS context. Code Len Initial NDS Context +----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-- | 87 | n | uc1 | uc2 | uc3 | ... +----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-- References [1] S. Alexander and R. Droms. DHCP Options and BOOTP Vendor Extensions. draft-ietf-dhc-options-1533update-04.txt, May 1996. [2] R. Droms. Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol. draft-ietf-dhc-dhcp-07.txt, May 1996. Author's Address Don Provan Novell, Inc. 2180 Fortune Drive San Jose, California, 95131 Phone: +1 408 577 8440 EMail: donp@Novell.Com Provan Expires 18 May 1997 [Page 3]