Subject: LDAP Client Update Protocol

From: [email-masked] (John Merrells)
Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1999 10:08:09 -0800

At the end of the LDUP meeting in Washington I introduced a new
topic for discussion: An LDAP Client Update Protocol. This new
protocol is intended to address the following client needs.

1 -  Mobile clients that maintain a local copy of directory data. 
     While off-line, the client uses the local copy of the data. 
     When the client connects to the network, it synchronizes with 
     the current directory content and can be optionally notified
     about the changes that occur while it is on-line. For example,
     a mail client can maintain a local copy of the corporate address
     book which it synchronizes with the master copy whenever the client
     gets connected to the corporate network. 

2 -  Applications intending to synchronize heterogeneous data stores.
     A meta directory application, for instance, would periodically
     retrieve a list of modified entries from the directory, construct 
     the changes and apply them to a foreign data store. 

3 -  Clients that need to take certain actions when a directory entry 
     is modified. For instance, an electronic mail repository may want
     to perform a "create mailbox" task when a new person entry is added
     to an LDAP directory and a "delete mailbox" task when a person entry
     is removed. 

This work will draw experience from the LDUP working group, and will
be predominently based upon the DirSync, PSearch, and TSearch drafts.

Since this work is suffiently distinct from LDUP and LDAPext I have
created a new mailing list for discussions on this topic. To subscribe
send a plain text message to [email-masked] with the
word 'subscribe' in the body.

John

[PSEARCH] M. Smith "A Simple LDAP Change Notification Mechanism", INTERNET-DRAFT
<draft-ietf-ldapext-psearch-01.txt>, August 1998. 

[TSEARCH] M.Whal "LDAPv3 Triggered Search Control", INTERNET-DRAFT
<draft-ietf-ldapext-trigger-01.txt>,  August 1998. 

[DIRSYNC] M. Armijo "Microsoft LDAP Control for Directory Synchronization",
INTERNET-DRAFT
<draft-armijo-ldap-dirsync-00.txt>, August 1999.

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From: Chris Apple <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Nov 1999 20:42:15 -0500

>      gets connected to the corporate network.

Is it your intent that 1 addresses the need of read-only clients?

Or can you make modifications to the local copy that are subsequently
synchronized to the server in addition to supporting the propagation
of updates from server to local copy?

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Chris Apple                     Business Site: AnyWho Directory Service
Internet Directory Group                       http://www.anywho.com
AT&T Labs
[email-masked]
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From: [email-masked] (John Merrells)
Date: Tue, 23 Nov 1999 17:43:52 -0800

> of updates from server to local copy?

My intention, is that this protocol is for a one way update from the
server to the client.  If the client wants to send updates to the
server then it should use the regular LDAP Update Operations to do
this.

If anyone replies to this message please restrict the recipient list
to ietf-lcup to save noise on ietf-ldapext and ietf-ldup.

John