RFC 1562 (rfc1562) - Page 2 of 4
Naming Guidelines for the AARNet X
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 1562 Naming Guidelines for the AARNet X.500 December 1993
2. The Australian X.500 domain
Standards Australia (SAA) have produced a document [3] that describes
the organisation of the Australian X.500 namespace. It is considered
that, as far as possible, we should align the AARNet Directory
Service with these requirements in order to provide a smooth
transition to an Australian Directory Service as ultimately the OSI
Registration Authority of Standards Australia has naming authority
for the DIT subtree underneath the node "c=AU".
The SAA document defines only two types of objects that can be placed
directly below the c=AU node in the DIT, organisations with
nationally recognised names and localities representing the states
and territories of the Commonwealth of Australia.
It is intended to follow this scheme with one modification. The
recommendation doesn't indicate where ADMD and PRMD names should be
registered and so these objects will be treated as for organisations
with nationally recognised names.
3. Entries representing DSAs
The naming convention currently used by the Internet leads to a large
amount of clutter due to organisational DSAs being named directly
under the country node. The "normal" user of a directory service
isn't interested in the mechanics of the service and so the presence
of these entries in such a prominent location is unfortunate. In
order to avoid this clutter, and to conform to SAA requirements, we
have created a pseudo organisation called DMD where all Australian
DSAs should be registered.
Rather than continue the Quipu tradition of naming DSAs after
endangered South American animals, in Australia, it is suggested that
DSAs be named after Australian fauna.
4. Entries representing the states and territories of Australia
Immediately subordinate to the Australian entry are locality objects
representing the eight states and territories of the Commonwealth of
Australia. The RDN of these entries will use the stateOrProvinceName
attribute and have values consisting of the standard Australian two
or three letter abbreviations for the particular state of territory.
5. Entries representing organisations
SAA recommends that organisations are registered as immediate
subordinates of either the Australian entry or of the eight states
and territories depending on the uniqueness of the organisation's
Michaelson & Prior