Using the OSI X.500 Directory: The White Pages Project Mark Knopper, MichNet Technical Staff, and Pat McGregor, MichNet Technical Support Group, USERW02V@UMICHUM Imagine being able to query a database from your desktop workstation and get the name, address, and electronic mail address of a colleague on the other side of the country. In fact, imagine being able to get a copy of a scanned-in picture from the database so that when you go to the airport to pick her up for a conference, you can recognize her without ever having met her. This sort of widespread information availability is one of the ambitions of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) application layer directory service known as X.500. The OSI Directory is a powerful way to organize information and distribute access and authority for it. According to Tim Howes, a University of Michigan programmer who is working on an X.500 project, The OSI X.500 standard defines a worldwide, online, interconnected Directory of all sorts of information. This information might include the name, university address, phone number, electronic mail address, and any other information the user wanted made available to the general public. An immense distributed database The Directory (which is always capitalized by those working on it) refers to one logical world-wide entity, says Howes. The implementation of this enormous listing is, of course, distributed, so there will be pieces of the Directory on many machines, similar to the way Domain Name Service works. The Domain Name Service (DNS) allows a computer in one part of the Internet to look for connection and naming information for computers in other parts of the Internet. No one computer has to keep a list of all other computers on the Internet. Instead, local computers keep track of those computers around them, and know which other computers to ask for information about other parts of the Internet. The DNS provides a single logically connected database of information, but the actual data in the DNS is spread across the Internet. The same is true of X.500. The White Pages Project More than seventy of the institutions which comprise the Internet are participating in a large project known as the White Pages. The White Pages will make use of X.500 services to provide an information base of users and organizations. Sponsored by Performance Systems International, Inc. (PSI) and NYSERNet (the New York state regional network), the White Pages Pilot Project is a distributed information service. It allows OSI technology to run on top of the Internet TCP/IP suite of protocols. The White Pages project is building a world-wide online phone book, something like the white pages in your local telephone directory. Later, it may expand to include other information, such as peoples professional interests, photos, favorite activities, and so on. This application of the Directory is one of the main reasons that CCITT (the international standards body which deals with telephone technologies) is backing X.500. 1 CCITT is a French acronym which means Consultative Committee for International Telegraph and Telephone. CCITT began as an organization dealing with telephone technologies but now is fully into OSI and computer communications. Its mission leans toward centrally provided services such as government-run networks. As of February, 1991, there were 74 participating organizations in the project, primarily universities but also some corporate, government, non-profit, and other organizations. There are over 200,000 users and organizations registered in the US portion of the White Pages directory information base. 2 The project in the US is integrated with several X.500 pilot projects in Europe. The project uses the programs known as quipu and ISODE, which were developed by University College London and Marshall Rose, respectively. According to Howes, the potential for the project goes beyond a simple look-up of a personUs name and phone number. The White Pages pilot project has created a structure where names and personal and organizational information can be stored. There are many possibilities for applications and user interfaces to the directory. Access can be built into existing applications to provide more human-oriented selection capability for hosts, resources, e-mail addresses, etc. Any information one might store in a directory or index can be immediately made available to the entire Internet or global OSI community. MichNet has joined this project and has several prototype applications that make use of the Directory. The project is open to new organizations, and MichNet members and affiliates are encouraged to join. The more organizations and institutions take part in the project, the more useful it will become. Information, Please! How users will eventually query the database is not yet completely defined. At this time, most of the ways to access the database are interactive screen sessions that look much like everyday interactive computer sessions. However, work is being done on more userfriendly interfaces to the White Pages, and also to create query mechanisms that will take advantage of developing technologies. The University of Michigan, says Howes, is working on a Macintosh user agent, and PSI supports an X-Windows user agent. What is Merit doing with X.500? NSFNET site contacts included in Directory Merit's NSFNET group has added network and site contact information to the Directory. Additionally, parts of the Internet Network Information CenterUs (NIC) main information database have been entered to assist the Merit Network Operations CenterUs (NOC) staff. The NOC uses this information to contact responsible people in the case of an outage, to make notifications, and to find out the electronic mail addresses of contacts at Internet sites. This information is also available to Internet users who are running the White Pages software. Merit has made this part of the Directory available to the regional networks attached to NSFNET. 3 SprintMail customers added The SprintMail-Internet mail gateway, which is operated by MichNet staff, allows Internet users to exchange mail with users on SprintMail's OSI X.400 based mail system. MichNet is developing a system based on the White Pages X.500 Directory which will allow SprintMail's customers to be registered in the directory. A University of Michigan-developed mail program will simplify addressing of SprintMail users from the Internet. Merit staff added Merit has entered its central staff members into the Directory. In the Directory, information is organized in a hierarchical fashion. Merit's listing is located under the United States branch of this information tree. We plan on running a modified mail program developed by Tim Howes, which enables use of personal email addresses for the Merit staff. Mail can be sent to the address Mark.Knopper@merit.edu, for example, and the directory will allow mail to be forwarded to whatever computer the staff member reads mail on. The sender won't need to know what machine that is, or what the staffer's userID is on that mail machine. Merit joins FOX project Merit staff are working on a National Science Foundation/Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sponsored project known as Field Operational X.500 (FOX). The project will help implement directory-related services in the Internet, and will allow different implementations of the X.500 services to interoperate. Also participating in this project are ISI (a research institute connected to Southern California University), SRI International, and PSI. Under this project, Merit intends to continue to work cooperatively with the NIC to make information on the national network infrastructure available to Internet users and managers. This work will also include using the Directory to provide information on OSI protocols in the NSFNET backbone. The FOX project is funded is for one year, beginning in January, 1991. University of Michigan software development quite large and changes have had to be made to the standard version of The University of Michigan has been working on entering information about its entire faculty and staff (over 17,000 people) into the Directory. This project is quite large and changes have had to be made to the standard version of the program quipu to handle the problems caused by this scale of implementation. Also new user interfaces have been developed to manage directory information. This work should help make the White Pages information useful at many other organizations. 4 The University of Michigan's white pages directory is expected to be released to users within the next year. How can my organization join the project? PSI, Inc., is encouraging organizations to join the White Pages Pilot Project.5 There is some introductory documentation available by anonymous FTP from merit.edu: the files introduction.ps and pilot.ps in the ftp/pub/x500 directory. The full ISODE and quipu distribution is available on the host uu.psi.net. MichNet is also willing to assist organizations who want to provide White Pages services and who want to use the quipu software. Quipu runs under UNIXTM systems such as Sun, DEC, and HP. Send e-mail to x500@merit.edu for assistance in getting or running the software. ************************************************************* CCNEWS Copyright Notice If you use this article, in whole or in part, in printed or electronic form, you are legally and morally obligated to credit the author and the original publication name, date, and page(s). We suggest that you also inform the author of your intention to use this article, in case there are updates or corrections that he or she might wish to suggest. The ideas and opinions expressed in this article, as well as articles obtained through CCNEWS and the CCNEWS Articles Archive, do not necessarily reflect those of EDUCOM. EDUCOM will not accept responsibility for misinformation, nor will EDUCOM be responsible for misuse of information obtained through the CCNEWS Articles Archive. If space and format permit, we would appreciate your crediting the "Articles database of CCNEWS, the Electronic Forum for Campus Computing Newsletter Editors, a BITNET-based service of EDUCOM." We would also appreciate your informing us (via e-mail to CCNEWS@EDUCOM) when you use an article, so we will know which articles have proven most useful. *************************************************************