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From: gebase@OSI3.NCSL.NIST.GOV (Len Gebase)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.iso.dev-environ
Subject: Re:  NIST X.500, BSD 4.4
Message-ID: <9007031405.AA22814@osi3.ncsl.nist.gov>
Date: 3 Jul 90 14:05:21 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Distribution: inet
Organization: National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
Lines: 48

>
>Does anyone know the status of NIST X.500 project?
>When will it be ready? What is its relationship with QUIPU?
>Can anyone provide a comparison of them? Will they inter-operate?
>
     Development of the NIST X500 implementation is ongoing. We are
currently working towards a first release that will support only the
Read, Add, Compare, and Remove operations. This release should be ready
within about one months time. Right now we're working on integration
testing. We've achieved a fair amount of success testing over the DAP and
are about to begin testing over the DSP. The initial release will not
include authentication, access control, or schema checking.

    We plan a second release that should be ready sometime around early 
fall. For this release we plan to add the List and Search operations and
include simple authentication, access control, and schema checking. Before
year's end we plan to have a third release that will support all operations.

    There's no relationship between the NIST and QUIPU implementations 
other than the fact that they're both implemented over the ISODE 
platform. As far as interoperability goes, we've maintained strict
adherence to both the DAP and DSP protocols, as I'm sure QUIPU has, so 
interoperability between our implementations, like interoperability
between all OSI implementations of the same protocol, will be a cinch.
    
    I can't provide any comparison between the NIST and QUIPU implementations
but I can provide a brief summary of the NIST implementation's features.
Our DSA can run as either a first level or non-first level DSA,
supports both DAP and DSP and chaining of operations, includes a configurable 
schema, simple authentication, attribute based access control, and supports 
replicated entries (replicated entries can only be added through
local batch files). 

     Additionally, the NIST implementation is designed to
run over a relational database that supports SQL. Locally we've
implemented a relational database system that's SQL based and that supports
the minimal set of functionality we found necessary to support our
DSA. We've attempted to keep the interface between the database and the rest
of the DSA clean so that our dbms can be replaced fairly easily by
a commercial database system. In an attempt to achieve reasonable performance
our implementation also includes options for optimizing performance
on all, or selected, locally administered naming contexts. Optimization
requires more memory usage but seems to significantly improve performance.
When a naming context is selected for optimization all naming information
for entries in the naming context are loaded into memory thereby resulting
in significantly better performance in carrying out name resolution.

--Len