Re: off topic : metadirectory

[Pierangelo Masarati <masarati@aero.polimi.it>]

Dhiren Pankhania wrote:
> 
> you will obtain info from the Burton Group, Syntegra (Control Data),
> Critical Path (Isocor), iPlanet (Sun) and a number of other organisations.
> They will provide platform support and what environments they will apply
> meta calls.
> 
> Metadirectories is not a defined standard so all tools provided are
> proprietary in nature but will use backend directory services for knowledge.
> As for openldap, I do not know of any organisation that has provided meta
> capability there, but there is no reason for not developing one.

Many features go under the definition of meta-directory. In OpenLDAP 
there's an attempt to implement a multi-target LDAP proxy that glues 
together different directories under a common naming context, possibly
thru regex/map-based dn rewriting. It is called back-meta, and is 
currently in the HEAD of the CVS. Eventually it might evolve in
something
more sophisticated, by adding a synchronous join capability.

To summarize: 

current back-meta: shows independent entries on separate servers as
belonging to the same naming context; there's no control for duplicate
results.

(future?) synchronous join: different portions of a single entry may 
reside on different servers, and the meta-directory shows it as a unique 
entity.

Pierangelo.

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