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Re: Problems with multiple names per OID
Frank Strauß wrote:
I guess this is kind of an FAQ, but I could not find an explanation so
far. If it is an FAQ, maybe someone give me just a pointer to the
right information.
There are several cases where multiple names are defined for a single
OID, e.g. core.schema defines the names "street" and "streetAddress"
both for 2.5.4.9. The Administration Guide says that when attributes
are sent they are labeled with the first name. However, the other
names are also valid in requests. Now the problem is that some LDAP
clients send names in their requests that are known to the LDAP server
as "secondary" names, resulting in responses with other names than the
ones in the request. This results in clients not being able to process
the response correctly, although the requested data is available and
even sent back to the client.
Examples are Mozilla Thunderbird and Apple Addressbook which use
different (but only one) names for OID 2.5.4.9 and others.
My personal impression (though I'm new to LDAP, but have quite some
experience with SNMP/SMI, which is also heavily based on ASN.1) is
that LDAP's design is broken in that it does send non-unique labels
instead of unique (and more compact) OIDs in the protocol. But maybe,
I'm just missing a way how to handle the problem correctly.
I'd agree that LDAP's design is deficient here. Certainly this problem
does not happen with X.500 DAP. I believe that you can use the rewrite
overlay and attribute mapping to handle this now. The relay backend may
also be useful.
--
-- Howard Chu
Chief Architect, Symas Corp. Director, Highland Sun
http://www.symas.com http://highlandsun.com/hyc
Symas: Premier OpenSource Development and Support