RFC 1487 (rfc1487) - Page 1 of 21
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Alternative Format: Original Text Document
Network Working Group W. Yeong
Request for Comments: 1487 Performance Systems International
T. Howes
University of Michigan
S. Kille
ISODE Consortium
July 1993
X.500 Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
Status of this Memo
This RFC specifies an IAB standards track protocol for the Internet
community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements.
Please refer to the current edition of the "IAB Official Protocol
Standards" for the standardization state and status of this protocol.
Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
Abstract
The protocol described in this document is designed to provide access
to the Directory while not incurring the resource requirements of the
Directory Access Protocol (DAP). This protocol is specifically
targeted at simple management applications and browser applications
that provide simple read/write interactive access to the Directory,
and is intended to be a complement to the DAP itself.
Key aspects of LDAP are:
- Protocol elements are carried directly over TCP or other transport,
bypassing much of the session/presentation overhead.
- Many protocol data elements are encoding as ordinary strings (e.g.,
Distinguished Names).
- A lightweight BER encoding is used to encode all protocol elements.
1. History
The tremendous interest in X.500 [1,2] technology in the Internet has
lead to efforts to reduce the high "cost of entry" associated with
use of the technology, such as the Directory Assistance Service [3]
and DIXIE [4]. While efforts such as these have met with success,
they have been solutions based on particular implementations and as
such have limited applicability. This document continues the efforts
to define Directory protocol alternatives but departs from previous
efforts in that it consciously avoids dependence on particular
Yeong, Howes & Kille