RFC 2148 (rfc2148) - Page 2 of 15
Deployment of the Internet White Pages Service
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 2148 Internet White Pages Service September 1997
(2) Internet Service providers SHOULD help smaller
organizations follow this recommendation, either by providing
services for hosting their data, by helping them find other
parties to do so, or by helping them bring their own service
on-line.
(3) All interested parties SHOULD make sure there exists a core
X.500 name space in the world, and that all names in this
name space are resolvable. (National name spaces may
elobarate on the core name space).
The rest of this document is justification and details for this
recommendation.
The words "SHOULD", "MUST" and "MAY", when written in UPPER CASE,
have the meaning defined in RFC 2119 [17]
2. Introduction
The Internet is used for information exchange and communication
between its users. It can only be effective as such if users are able
to find each other's addresses. Therefore the Internet benefits from
an adequate White Pages Service, i.e., a directory service offering
(Internet) address information related to people and organizations.
This document describes the way in which the Internet White Pages
Service (from now on abbreviated as IWPS) is best exploited using
today's experience, today's protocols, today's products and today's
procedures.
Experience [2] has shown that a White Pages Service based on self-
registration of users or on centralized servers tends to gather data
in a haphazard fashion, and, moreover, collects data that ages
rapidly and is not kept up to date.
The most vital attempts to establish the IWPS are based on models
with distributed (local) databases each holding a manageable part of
the IWPS information. Such a part mostly consists of all relevant
IWPS information from within a particular organization or from within
an Internet service provider and its users. On top of the databases
there is a directory services protocol that connects them and
provides user access. Today X.500 is the most popular directory
services protocol on the Internet, connecting the address information
of about 1,5 million individuals and 3,000 organizations. Whois++ is
the second popular protocol. X.500 and Whois++ may also be used to
interconnect other information than only IWPS information, but here
we only discuss the IWPS features.
Alvestrand & Jurg Best Current Practice