RFC 1562 (rfc1562) - Page 2 of 4

Naming Guidelines for the AARNet X

RFC 1562         Naming Guidelines for the AARNet X.500    December 1993


2.  The Australian X.500 domain

   Standards Australia (SAA) have produced a document [3] that describes
   the organisation of the Australian X.500 namespace. It is considered
   that, as far as possible, we should align the AARNet Directory
   Service with these requirements in order to provide a smooth
   transition to an Australian Directory Service as ultimately the OSI
   Registration Authority of Standards Australia has naming authority
   for the DIT subtree underneath the node "c=AU".

   The SAA document defines only two types of objects that can be placed
   directly below the c=AU node in the DIT, organisations with
   nationally recognised names and localities representing the states
   and territories of the Commonwealth of Australia.

   It is intended to follow this scheme with one modification. The
   recommendation doesn't indicate where ADMD and PRMD names should be
   registered and so these objects will be treated as for organisations
   with nationally recognised names.

3.  Entries representing DSAs

   The naming convention currently used by the Internet leads to a large
   amount of clutter due to organisational DSAs being named directly
   under the country node. The "normal" user of a directory service
   isn't interested in the mechanics of the service and so the presence
   of these entries in such a prominent location is unfortunate. In
   order to avoid this clutter, and to conform to SAA requirements, we
   have created a pseudo organisation called DMD where all Australian
   DSAs should be registered.

   Rather than continue the Quipu tradition of naming DSAs after
   endangered South American animals, in Australia, it is suggested that
   DSAs be named after Australian fauna.

4.  Entries representing the states and territories of Australia

   Immediately subordinate to the Australian entry are locality objects
   representing the eight states and territories of the Commonwealth of
   Australia. The RDN of these entries will use the stateOrProvinceName
   attribute and have values consisting of the standard Australian two
   or three letter abbreviations for the particular state of territory.

5.  Entries representing organisations

   SAA recommends that organisations are registered as immediate
   subordinates of either the Australian entry or of the eight states
   and territories depending on the uniqueness of the organisation's



Michaelson & Prior