RFC 1802 (rfc1802) - Page 2 of 11
Introducing Project Long Bud: Internet Pilot Project for the Deployment of X
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
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