[Ietf-not43] pointers to TISDAG project

[Leslie Daigle]

Howdy,

At the meeting last week, it was suggested that I forward some
references to the Swedish TISDAG project to the list.

By way of context -- the TISDAG project's goal was to provide
a single point of contact for searching for users' e-mail
addresses, while respecting the fact that the actual data
was stored in individual service provider/enterprise directories
(i.e., that were not going to be centralized any time soon).

Two key technical things to note about the TISDAG situation:

	1/ there wasn't the possibility (at the time) of 
	   assuming a single access protocol, so it was
	   necessary to do query and result mapping

	2/ it was about search -- that is, you couldn't
	   know in advance which server might be authoritative
	   for a given user  (if you want the e-mail address
	   for Leslie Daigle in Kista, that doesn't give you
	   a clue about what provider might have an e-mail
	   address for me).  This meant that it was critical
	   to have some kind of mechanism for intelligently
	   distributing the queries across the leaf servers
	   (in this case, an index or "hints" database that
	   provided references to likely targets)
	   
A lot of what we're discussing so far in CRISP leverages the 
structured nature of domain names (and IP allocations) so that 
the client has some ability to find authoritative servers by
location (not search through hints).  

So, the documents:  to follow up on the discussion in the WG
meeting, RFC2967 is about as far as you'll ever want to go. It
is the original tech spec for the project -- describing the 
requirements and architecture in more detail, as well as the 
actual components.   

The follow on discussion documents are only interesting if you really
get "into" the idea and want to see where we thought it might lead.
They are:
	RFC2968 -- discussion of mesh topologies
	RFC2969 -- practical experiences from implementation
	  (including surprises from various client software
	   implementations)
	RFC2970 -- an attempt to generalize the TISDAG 
	   architecture.  I would write it very differently
	   if I were writing it again today...

Leslie.

-- 

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"An essential element of a successful journey
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Leslie Daigle
leslie@thinkingcat.com
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