draft-zeilenga-ldap-features-xx.txt [plain text]
INTERNET-DRAFT Kurt D. Zeilenga
Intended Category: Standard Track OpenLDAP Foundation
Expires: 26 December 2001 26 June 2001
Feature Discovery in LDAP
<draft-zeilenga-ldap-features-01.txt>
Status of this Memo
This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with all
provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026.
This document is intended to be, after appropriate review and
revision, submitted to the RFC Editor as an Standard Track document.
Distribution of this memo is unlimited. Technical discussion of this
document will take place on the IETF LDAP Extension Working Group
mailing list <ietf-ldapext@netscape.com>. Please send editorial
comments directly to the author <Kurt@OpenLDAP.org>.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task
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Copyright 2001, The Internet Society. All Rights Reserved.
Please see the Copyright section near the end of this document for
more information.
1. Overview
LDAP [RFC2251] is an extensible protocol with numerous elective
features. LDAP provides mechanisms for a client to discover supported
protocol versions, controls, extended operations, SASL mechanisms, and
subschema information. However, these mechanisms are not designed to
support general feature discovery.
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This document describes a simple, general-purpose mechanism which
clients may use to discovery the set of features supported by a
server.
The key words ``MUST'', ``MUST NOT'', ``REQUIRED'', ``SHALL'', ``SHALL
NOT'', ``SHOULD'', ``SHOULD NOT'', ``RECOMMENDED'', and ``MAY'' in
this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119
[RFC2119].
2. Discovery of supported features
Each feature whose support may be discovered SHALL be identified by an
Object Identifier (OID). A server advertises its support for a given
feature by providing the OID associated with the feature as a value of
the supportedFeatures attribute held in the root DSE. A client may
examine the values of this attribute to determine if a particular
feature is supported by the server.
The supportedFeatures attribute type is described [RFC2252] as
follows:
( 1.3.6.1.4.1.4203.1.3.5
NAME 'supportedFeatures'
DESC 'features supported by the server'
EQUALITY objectIdentifierMatch
SYNTAX 1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.115.121.1.38
USAGE dSAOperation )
3. Security Considerations
As rogue clients can discover features of a server by other means
(such as by trial and error), this feature discovery mechanism is not
believed to introduce any new security risk to LDAP.
4. Acknowledgment
This document is based upon input from the IETF LDAPext working group.
5. Author's Address
Kurt D. Zeilenga
OpenLDAP Foundation
<Kurt@OpenLDAP.org>
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References
[RFC2219] S. Bradner, "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", RFC 2119, March 1997.
[RFC2251] M. Wahl, T. Howes, S. Kille, "Lightweight Directory Access
Protocol (v3)", RFC 2251, December 1997.
[RFC2252] M. Wahl, A. Coulbeck, T. Howes, S. Kille, "Lightweight
Directory Access Protocol (v3): Attribute Syntax
Definitions", RFC 2252, December 1997.
Full Copyright
Copyright 2001, The Internet Society. All Rights Reserved.
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