Re: schema syntax: Octet string vs IA5 string

[Stig Venaas <Stig@OpenLDAP.org>]

On Fri, Nov 30, 2001 at 12:30:02PM +0100, Julio Sánchez Fernández wrote:
> Roel van Meer <rolek@linvision.com> writes:
> 
> > Assuming this, i thought i had two choices, octet or IA5 string. When i
> > found out that the directory server doesn't check if the value you give
> > is actually matching your syntax (i can put a random string in an octet
> > string attribute), the only two criteria i had were performance and
> > logic.
> 
> You have misunderstood the term "octet string".  Read blob for it and
> it will make more sense.
> 
> You can put anything on an octet string.

If you want to store the IP address so that it is humanly readable and
possible to access with simple tools like ldapsearch etc. I would use
IA5 and store it in the conventional humanly readable form. There might
be some other relevant syntaxes, but I would prefer IA5 to octet string.
If you for some reason want to store it as 4 bytes, octet string would
be possible, IA5 would not.

I and probably others could be interested in storing IP addresses and/or
prefixes with some special matching so that one could find addresses
with a given prefix (within a given network), or search for all pre-
fixes/networks that contain a given address.

Stig