The HEP White Pages Project

Ray JacksonCERN / IT - Internet Services Group

23rd April 2001 - HEPiX/HEPNT Conference, LAL-Orsay, France.

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Introduction Aim is to have a Global Address Book Scope covers ALL people involved in

HEP community Individual queries transparent to users Based on Standard Protocols (OS and

Hardware independent) Must be highly scalable, fast & reliable

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Why use LDAP? Official Internet Standard Protocol for

Accessing Directories (IETF) Hardware/OS independent – No vendor ties. Replaces proprietary protocols with an

‘open’ protocol (like SMTP & IMAP for e-mail)

Wide industry support (Microsoft, Novell, Sun, Netscape, Oracle, IBM, Cisco etc.)

Already widely used and deployed.

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Referrals in HEP White Pages

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HEP Address Book at CERN

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Web Interface example

http://cern.ch/hepsearch

(NOTE: This is simply a test interface to illustratethe possibilities offered by the HEP White Pages)

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Advantages to HEP WP. Each organisation maintains it’s own data Highly scalable. (Millions of people) Transparent to users. (New referral can be

added/removed without client intervention) Single source of information HEP tree can be housed on any LDAP server.

(Referrals act as pointers to same data) Low maintenance and easily managed.

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Issues with HEP White Pages Based on informal agreements Reliability of data can vary between organisations Duplication of people entries? No unique identifier for a person in the HEP scope No LDAP server = No participation If one server goes down in HEP scope then

complete results delayed until time-out. Legal implications (opt-out of HEP scope) Different usage of attributes e.g. roomnumber vs.

physicalDeliveryOfficeName