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TechTalks Event

Building Directories: the Fundamentals

with guest experts Ken Klingenstein and Keith Hazelton

February 17, 2000

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What services does a general-purpose enterprise-wide directory provide? What is a directory namespace and what are its components? What should be used as a unique identifier or identifiers? Are there IDs that are not visible to users? What about using SSNs or netIDs? What do directory identifiers do? Why do we care about them? What are their characteristics? How are they used? Where do they come from? Who owns them? Are there standards we should use? Which identifiers should be indexed? Are there special identifiers used only in higher education? Should a university have unique IDs across the entire campus? What about including alums? How do we feed and update information into the directory? What are "registries," "policies," "profiles," and "trust models" with respect to directories? How do these affect our use of directories and our security model in higher education?

Whew! And those are just some of the initial questions which come to mind. Join us with our guest experts as they answer some of these questions, and some you might ask via email to expert@cren.net, and above all else let us know: What should we be watching for in directories, and where should be watching for it?

If you're interested in directories and authentication, you might want to learn more about CREN's Certificate Authority Service.

Guest Experts

Ken KlingensteinKen Klingenstein, the Director of Information Technology Services at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has been a guest expert for TechTalk before. Ken, a member of CREN's Board of Trustees, has been active in national and regional networking since 1985, serving as a member and former Chair of the Federal Networking Council Advisory Committee (FNCAC), member of the Board for Farnet, now Net@Edu and as co-founder of Colorado Supernet, among others. He has testified before Congress on topics in networking. He was formerly on the Board of Directors for CAUSE (now consolidated with Educom as EDUCAUSE) and serves on the Coalition for Networked Information's Steering Committee. He regularly presents papers and seminars to many professional networking and computing groups.

Keith HazeltonKeith Hazelton is IT Architect at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Network Applications Consortium (NAC), a member of the Internet 2 Middleware Architecture Council for Education (MACE), a member of the Net@Edu PKI Working Group and a coordinator for the Edu-Person Object Class Working Group, sponsored by Internet 2 and Net@Edu. He is a frequent participant and sometimes presenter at Common Solutions Group (CSG) and Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) meetings and workshops. In addition to the edu-Person initiative, his current work includes planning for shared infrastructure services at UW-Madison, planning for a UW System-wide LDAP-accessible white pages and leading a SIG that is drafting a NAC position paper entitled "Exploiting Directories in E-Business Applications."�

Co-Hosts

Howard Strauss, Manager of Academic Applications at Princeton University, is TechTalk's Technology Anchor. Co-Host Judith Boettcher is CREN's Executive Director. Together, Howard and Judith will ask the really tough questions—and relay the questions you email to them at expert@cren.net.


Background & Resources

The best place to start is in the Tech Talk archives, which are a treasure trove of related information including the following archived events:

Additional resources include: If you want to go the book route, check out Digital Certificates: Applied Internet Security, by Jalal Feghhi, Peter Williams, Jalil Feghhi or Understanding and Deploying Ldap Directory Services by Howes, Smith, and Good or LDAP: Programming Directory-Enabled Applications With Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (MacMillan Technology Series) by Tim Howes and Mark Smith or Implementing LDAP by Mark Wilcox. And here's a new recommendation from Keith: Understanding Public-Key Infrastructure: Concepts, Standards, and Deployment Considerations by Carlisle Adams and Steve Lloyd.