Directory Services Project

Directory Services Infrastructure

These are the various facets of our current Directory Service Infrastructure on SUNet...

• NetDB

  NetDB contains information on SUNet's physical components, such as host computers, workstations, terminal servers, and gateways. It "owns" SUNet's IP address space and LNAs and Networking staff use it as a tool for assigning addresses to workstations, routers, and other network components. You can effectively query NetDB via Whois since we download NetDB's database into Whois nightly. Additionally, we dynamically construct the Domain Name System database twice daily from NetDB information. Select this item for more info about NetDB.

• Domain Name System (DNS)

  The DNS is the service your computer software uses to lookup the addresses of machines it needs or you want to talk with. It is a globally distributed, Internet service. Our servers provide stanford domain information to those outside Stanford as well as to those within.

  • Query the Domain Name System

    This tool allows you to make relatively arbitrary queries to the global DNS. We're still testing it, so it is only available to systems within the Stanford.edu domain.

  • Domain Name System (DNS) Deployment Document

    This item describes our DNS deployment and the timing of the database updates from NetDB. We specify the addresses of our DNS servers.

• The Stanford Whois-based Directory Service

  This item is a simple web interface to "Whois", our current general-purpose directory service which is based on the Whois protocol.

  Information in Whois is fed to us from Communication Services's phone directory database. This database is in turn fed from..

  • Human Resources' CHRIS system
  • The Registrar's NSI system
  • SLAC Human Resources
  • SHS (Hospital) Human Resources
  • ..and perhaps other various sources

  We are actively working on upgrading the technology base of our general-purpose directory service. Here is a summary about our directions.

• SUNet Next-Generation Directory Service (Dirsvc NG)

  Our next-generation directory service is based on X.500 and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) technology, rather than being Whois-based like our current directory service. It has been running in production since May 1996, serving infrastructure needs such as routing "@Stanford.edu" email (SEAS), and providing SUNet ID-to-UnivID mapping.

  We're presently working on migrating the general-purpose, whitepages directory service from the Whois-based service (described above) to the LDAP-based directory service. We plan to accomplish this during winter 1998.

• A roadmap of web-based info on LDAP & X.500 is available here.

Last updated: 18-Oct-1998

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