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Network Working Group                            S.E. Hardcastle-Kille
Requests for Comments 1279                   University College London
                                                         November 1991







                          X.500 and Domains









Status of this Memo
    This memo defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet
    community.  Discussion and suggestions for improvement are
    requested.  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

    This RFCconsiders X.500 in relation to Internet and UK Domains.
    A basic model of X.500 providing a higher level and more
    descriptive naming structure is emphasised.  In addition, a
    mapping of domains onto X.500 is proposed, which gives a range of
    new management and user facilities over and above those currently
    available.  This specification proposes an experimental new
    mechanism to access and manage domain information on the Internet
    and in the UK Academic Community.  There is no current intention
    to provide an operational replacement for DNS.




RFC 1279                X.500 and Domains                November 1991


1  The Domain Name System

The Domain (Nameserver) System (DNS) provides a hierarchical resource
labelling system [Moc87a] [Moc87b] [Lar83].  Example domains are:

MIT.EDU
VENERA.ISI.EDU
CS.UCL.AC.UK


Entries usually have a single name, although pointers to entries (not
subtrees) may be provided by CNAME records.  Information (resource
records) is associated with each entry.  Name components are typically
chosen to be shortish (e.g., ``CS'').
RFC 822 mailbox names are closely related [Cro82].  For example:


    [email protected]>

The local-part of the RFC 822 mailbox can be considered as one level
lower in the domain hierarchy.


2  X.500

The OSI Directory, usually known as X.500, provides a very general
naming framework [CCI88].  A basic usage of X.500 is to provide
Organisationally Structured Names.  A Schema for this is defined
within the standard.  Name components will typically have longish
values.  This is an example directory name represented in Tabular
form:


           Country              GB
           Organisation         University College London
           Organisational Unit  Computer Science
           Common Name          Stephen E. Hardcastle-Kille

This can also be written in the ``User Friendly Name'' notation
defined in [HK91].  This syntax is used for names in the rest of this
document:


    Stephen E. Hardcastle-Kille, Computer Science,

Hardcastle-Kille
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