aarn-ds@cc.uq.oz.au (AARNet Directory Project) (05/14/91)
Archive-name: internet/x500/aarnet-ds/1991-05-09 Archive-directory: ftp.adelaide.edu.au:/pub/white_pages/ [129.127.40.3] Original-posting-by: aarn-ds@cc.uq.oz.au (AARNet Directory Project) Original-subject: AARNet Directory Project Report (Introduction) [revised 9 Apr 91] Reposted-by: emv@msen.com (Edward Vielmetti, MSEN) The Australian Academic and Research Network Directory Services (AARNet DS) Project is implementing a pilot, national, electronic directory service over AARNet. This directory (in its simplest sense) can be seen as analogous to an internal telephone directory (and indeed can be used as such), but it is also capable of providing access to an on-line distributed database of the individuals, resources and organisations which form Australia's academic and research community. With links to similar projects in many other countries this service will become a significant component of the global academic and research infrastructure. The following two articles contain statistics gathered in the last month. Information in these reports covers all directories in operation in Australia that are reachable from AARNet not just those operated by the members of the AARNet Directory Project. The first article gives an indication of the amount of information available in each of the DSAs (Directory System Agents). The first column lists the organisations (or places) with information in the directory. The second column lists the number of entries in each of the DSAs and the third column lists the DSA. More than one organisation may have information loaded in any one DSA and any organisation may run more than one DSA. Only the DSAs holding definative information about the DIT (Directory Information Tree) are listed. The second of these statistics articles gives an indication of the general availability of the DSAs. Each of the DSAs are probed several times a day to determine whether they are available. The first column is the number of attempts that were made to connect to the DSA, the second the number of failures to successfully connect, and the third the percentage of successful connections. The "Best", "Worst" and "Ave" columns are an indication of how long it took to connect to the DSA. The final column indicates how the attempt was made. Most of the DSAs are only accessible via AARNet (using the Internet Protocols) but some are also accessible via X.25. Accessing the Directory ----------------------- The directory can be accessed over AARNet by using the anonymous "fred" account on "wp.adelaide.edu.au" (login as fred, any password). There is a choice of DUAs (Directory User Agents) that you can use to access the directory. If you are running X you should try the pod dua. If you do not have access to AARNet you can still query the directory via e-mail. Send the message "help" to "whitepages@wp.adelaide.edu.au" to find out how to query the directory via this method. If you want to run your own directory (or just run the user agents locally) the software we are using is available for anonymous ftp (or fetchfile) from ftp.adelaide.edu.au (sirius.oz) as "pub/isode/isode-interim.tar.Z" (up to date copies of the EDB files for the root and Australia are also available in the directory "pub/white_pages"). We are using dedicated DECstation-3100s running Ultrix and although BSD based Unix systems are preferable most Unix platforms can be used. Work is continuing on ports to other operating systems, including VMS. If you require any information about the AARNet Directory Project feel free to contact Graham Rees at the Prentice Centre of the University of Queensland (g.rees@cc.uq.oz.au). -- comp.archives file verification ftp.adelaide.edu.au total 122 -rw-r--r-- 1 90 3485 May 13 12:18 c=AU.o=DMD.EDB -rw-r--r-- 1 90 79898 May 13 06:22 root.EDB -rw-r--r-- 1 90 30108 May 12 04:32 c=AU.EDB -rw-r--r-- 1 90 2550 Oct 5 1990 README -rw-r--r-- 1 90 747 Oct 5 1990 cn=.EDB -rw-r--r-- 1 90 1457 Oct 5 1990 sample.EDB -rw-r--r-- 1 90 150 Sep 20 1990 organisation -rw-r--r-- 1 90 317 Sep 5 1990 person -rw-r--r-- 1 90 230 Sep 4 1990 department found aarnet-ds ok ftp.adelaide.edu.au:/pub/white_pages/