mrose@CHEETAH.NYSER.NET (Marshall Rose) (09/29/89)
Hi. You might recall having seen a message three months ago when NYSERNet started a pilot project in providing White Pages service. Using White Pages, you can get e-mail, postal, or telecommunications information about someone you wanted to contact. The idea was to use the TCP/IP and the Internet to provide the transit backbone, the OSI X.500 Directory to provide the underlying technology, and then to build a White Pages "abstraction" on top of this. Although the pilot was focused on sites in the NYSERNet regional network, other Internet sites, if interested, were allowed to join. Anyway, as of this morning, we counted 98,417 entries in the White Pages from 25 sites, primarily from University sites, although some corporate sites are also participating. To my knowledge this makes this pilot the largest nameservice in the Internet, easily the largest OSI pilot in Directory, and easily the largest use of OSI services in the Internet. As you might imagine, over the last 90 days a lot of code has been broken and fixed, and a lot of things have been (re-)learned. The pilot will run until June of next year, when I hope to have an order of magnitude more data available. Of course, there's a lot of hard work between now and then (sigh). If you are interested in poking around, telnet to wp.nyser.net and login as fred this will provide you with a White Pages shell. Keep in mind when using this service that it is highly distributed but not fully replicated yet (something to be addressed in the next couple of months). As such, network and host outages may cause variable delays in service. If you have any problems with the service, IMMEDIATELY drop a line to wpp-manager@nisc.nyser.net noting the date/time of the problem, the command(s) you issued, etc. /mtr ps: the 98K figure is short, there are some sites, which do not allow full counting of the number of entries they have in the Directory. pps: if you'll be at the Industry-event INTEROP 89 next week, there will be a birds-of-a-feather on White Pages on Wednesday at 6:00pm.