RFC 1802 (rfc1802) - Page 2 of 11

Introducing Project Long Bud: Internet Pilot Project for the Deployment of X

RFC 1802              Introducing Project Long Bud             June 1995


   In the MHS infrastructure, as compared to other protocols, a name by
   itself does not contain enough information to allow the Message
   Transfer Agents (MTAs) to route a message to the User Agent (UA)
   servicing this name.  The routing process is based on information
   provided by different MHS Management Domains, whether they are public
   or private.

   An MHS community combines several administrative MHS domains among
   which agreements for cooperative routing exist:  the GO-MHS community
   is the set of MTA's taking care of X.400 mail operations on the
   Internet [RFC 1649].

   In the absence of a distributed Directory Service, an interim
   technique has been developed within the GO-MHS community to collect
   and advertise routing information.  This resulted in an experimental
   IETF protocol [RFC 1465].

2. Rationale

   A number of routing problems are preventing the present Internet
   X.400 service from expanding its number of participating message
   transfer agents to a global scale.  The two most critical problems
   are:

      * The present mechanism of centrally maintained and advertized
        MTA routing tables has been optimized as far as possible.
        Increasing the number of directly connected MTAs increases also
        the workload on the MHS managers.  The current solution does
        not scale.  Routing must be a fully dynamic and distributed
        process.

      * Manual propagation and installation of routing tables do not
        guarantee consistency of routing information (even in a loose
        fashion) when it is accessed by different MTAs scattered across
        the globe.

   It is commonly accepted that a distributed mechanism providing for
   dynamic updating and management of X.400 routing information is
   highly desirable.  The focus of the project is to establish X.500-
   based support of X.400 routing, at a very large scale.

3. Benefits

   Using the Directory as a dynamic means of information storage and
   advertisement will guarantee participants in Project Long Bud that
   their updated data are globally available to the community.  As a
   direct consequence of the above, a participating MHS manager will be
   released from configuring connections to the other participants.



Alvestrand, et al            Informational