P A R A D I S E I N T E R N A T I O N A L R E P O R T N U M B E R 2 N O V E M B E R 1 9 9 1 Table of Contents (by country) National Representation & Contact Points Directory Statistics Country Reports 1. National Representation & Contact Points A U S T R A L I A Organisation: AARNet Directory Project Contact: Graham Rees The Prentice Centre The University of Queensland St Lucia, Queensland 4072 Telephone: +61 7 365 4143 E-mail: G.Rees@cc.uq.oz.au aarn-ds@cc.uq.oz.au A U S T R I A Representative: ACONET Contact: Florian Schnabel Technische Universitat Graz EDV-Zentrum Steyrergasse 30/1 A-8010 Graz Telephone: +43 31 68 736 255 Email: schnabel@edvz.tu-graz.ada.at B E L G I U M Representative: University of Brussels Contact: Nils Meulemans ULB, IIHE - Groupe HELIOS-B CP 230 - Bd. du Triomphe B-1050 Brussels Telephone: +32 2 641 35 53 Email: nils@elem4.iihe.ac.be B R A Z I L Representative: CNPq Contact: Eduardo Tadao Takahashi Rede Nacional de Pesquisa - CNPq Rua Dr. Antonio Augusto de Almeida, 334 Cidade Universitaria 13083 Campinas SP, Brasil Telephone: +55-192-39-4141 Email: tadao@ethos1.ansp.br C A N A D A Organisation: University of Western Ontario Contact: Peter Marshall CCS, Room 203, Natural Sciences Building University of Western Ontario, London, Canada N6A 5B7 Telephone: +1 519 661-2111 6032 Email peter.marshall@uwo.ca D E N M A R K Representative: DKnet Contact: Steen Linden Department of Computer Science University of Copenhagen Universitetsparken 1 DK-2100 Copenhagen Telephone: +45 31 39 64 66 x222 Email: steen.linden@dkuug.dk E U R O P E Representative: PARADISE Contact: PARADISE Helpdesk ULCC 20 Guildford Street London WC1N 1DZ Telephone: +44 71 405 8400 x 432 Email: helpdesk@paradise.ulcc.ac.uk F I N L A N D Representative: FUNET Contact: Petri Ojala FUNET c/o VTKK PO Box 40 SF-02101 Espoo Telephone: +358 0 457 2005 Email: ojala@funet.fi F R A N C E Representative: OPAX Contact: Paul-Andre Pays Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne 158, Cours Fuariel 42023 Saint-Etienne Cedex 2 Telephone: +33 77 42 01 74 X.400: s=pays;o=emse;p=emse;a=atlas;c=fr rfc822: pays@emse.fr G E R M A N Y Representative: DFN Contact: Karl Bonacker GMD Postfach 1240 5605 St Augustin 1 Telephone: +49 22 41 14 27 21 Email: bonacker@f3.gmd.dbp.de G R E E C E Representative: Network Ariadne Contact: Yannis Corovesis NRC Demokritos 15310 Attiki Telephone: +30 1 65 13 392 X.400: s=corovesis;o=ariadne-t;p=ariadne-t;c=gr rfc822: korov@grathdem.bitnet I C E L A N D Organisation: University of Iceland Contact: Marius Olafsson University of Iceland Sudurgotu 107 Reykjavik Telephone: +354 1 694932 Email marius@rhi.hi.is I R E L A N D Representative: Trinity College Dublin Contact: Donal O'Mahony Computer Science Department Trinity College Dublin 2 Telephone: +353 1 7021261 Email: omahony@cs.tcd.ie I S R A E L Representative: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Contact: Juliana Solomon Computation Center Taylor Building, Givat Ram The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Jerusalem Telephone: +972 2 584539 Email: juli@shum.huji.ac.il I T A L Y Contact: CNUCE Representative: Giovanni Armanino CNUCE - Istituto del CNR Reparto Infrastrutture di Rete per la Ricerca Via S. Maria, 36 56126 Pisa Telephone: +39 50 593246 Email: giovanni@rirr.cnuce.cnr.it J A P A N Representative: WIDE Project/ISODE Working Group Contact: Hideki Sunahara Dept. of Computer Science The University of Electro-Communications 1-5-1 Chofugaoka Chofu-shi, Tokyo 182 Telephone: +81 424 83 2161 ext.4122 or 4172 Email: suna@cs.uec.ac.jp L U X E M B O U R G Representative: RESTENA Contact: Theo Duhautpas RESTENA 6, rue Coudenhove-Kalergi L-1359 Luxembourg-Kirchbourg Telephone: +352 42 44 09 X.400: s=duhautpas;ou=restena;p=restena;a=pt;c=lu T H E N E T H E R L A N D S Representative: SURFnet BV Contact: Erik Huizer Netwerkontwikkeling Postbus 19035 3501 DA Utrecht Telephone: +31 30 310290 Email: huizer@surfnet.nl N E W Z E A L A N D Representative: Victoria University Wellington Contact: Andy Linton Victoria University Wellington Telephone: +64 4 471 5328 email: andy.linton@nz.ac.vuw.comp N O R W A Y Representative: UNINETT Contact: UNINETT Directory Project c/o University of Oslo/USIT POB 1059 - Blindern 0316 Oslo Telephone: +47 2 453470 Email: directory-adm@uninett.no P O R T U G A L Representative: Universidade do Minho Contact: Joaquim Macedo/Fernando Pinto Departamento de Informatica Universidade do Minho 4719 Braga Telephone: +351 53 612257 ext 432/1 rfc822: macedo@uminho.pt X.400: s=macedo;p=uminho;a= ;c=pt S P A I N Representative: IRIS Programme/FUNDESCO Contact: Celestino Tomas RedIRIS/FUNDESCO Alcala 61 E-28014 Madrid Telephone: +34 14351214 Email: tomas@iris-dcp.es S W E D E N Representative: SUNET Contact: Roland Hedberg SUNET Umdac, S-90187 Telephone: +46 90 165 204 Email: roland@umu.se S W I T Z E R L A N D Representative: SWITCH Contact: Thomas Lenggenhager SWITCH ETH-Zentrum CH-8092 Zurich Telephone: +41 1 261 8178 Email: lenggenhager@verw.switch.ch U N I T E D K I N G D O M Representative: Joint Network team Contact: Directory Project Manager X-Tel Services Ltd University Park Nottingham NG7 2RD Telephone: +44 602 412648 Email: x500@xtel.co.uk U N I T E D S T A T E S Representative: White Pages Project Contact: PSI Inc. 5201 Great American Parkway Suite 3106 Santa Clara, CA 95054 Telephone: +1 408 562 6222 Email: wpp-manager@psi.com Y U G O S L A V I A Representative: Contact: Marko Bonac University of Ljubljana Jozef Stefan Institute Jamova 39 61000 Ljubljana Telephone: +38 61 159199 X.400: s=bonac;o=ijs;p=ac;a=mail;c=yu rfc822: bonac@ijs.yu 2. Directory Statistics A U S T R A L I A Implementation: QUIPU 7.0 Master DSA: Anaconda DSAs: 23 Organisations: 29 Entries: 30,321 A U S T R I A Implementation: QUIPU 7.0 Master DSA: Piranah DSAs: 3 Organisations: 18 Entries: 1516 B E L G I U M Implementation: QUIPU 7.0 Master DSA: Woolly Spider Monkey DSAs: 1 Organisations: 1 Entries: 8 B R A Z I L Implementation(s): QUIPU 6.8 Master DSA: Tanager DSAs: 1 Organisations: Entries: C A N A D A Implementation: QUIPU 7.0 Master DSA: Beluga Whale DSAs: 11 Organisations: 11 Entries: 21,285 D E N M A R K Implementation: QUIPU 7.0 Master DSA: Axolotl DSAs: 2 Organizations: 340 Entries: 920 E U R O P E Implementation: QUIPU 7.0 Master DSA: Giant Tortoise DSAs: 3 Organisations: 3 Entries: 1000 F I N L A N D Implementation: QUIPU 7.0 Master DSA: Jaguar DSAs: 16 Organisations: 17 Entries: 11,316 F R A N C E Implementations: PIZARRO, QUIPU Master DSA: opax-dsa DSAs: 10 Organisations: 11 Entries: 1015 G E R M A N Y Implementation: QUIPU 7.0 Master DSA: Puma DSAs: 23 Organisations: 130 Entries: 7237 G R E E C E Implementation: QUIPU 6.8 Master DSA: None DSAs: 0 I C E L A N D Implementation: QUIPU 7.0 Master DSA: Elephant Seal DSAs: 1 Organisations: 28 Entries: 250 I R E L A N D Implementation: QUIPU 7.0 MasterDSA: Irish Elk DSAs: 1 Organisations: 1 Entries: 1500 I S R A E L Implementation: QUIPU 7.0 Master DSA: Dorcan Gazelle DSAs: 1 Organisations: 1 Entries: 10 I T A L Y Implementations: QUIPU 7.0, DirWiz Master DSA: Black Widow DSAs: 2 Organisations: 2 Entries: 20 J A P A N Implementation: QUIPU 7.0 Master DSA: Japan Master DSAs: 13 Organisation: 13 Entries: 2100 L U X E M B O U R G Implementation: QUIPU 6.0 Master DSA: None DSAs: None T H E N E T H E R L A N D S Implementation: QUIPU 7.0 Master DSA: Hornero DSAs: 3 Organisations: 7 Entries: 2128 N E W Z E A L A N D Implementation: QUIPU 7.0 Master DSA: Kakapo DSAs: 1 Organisations: 1 Entries: 100 N O R W A Y Implementation: QUIPU 7.0 MasterDSA: Electric Eel DSAs: 9 Organisations: 426 Entries: 15,934 P O R T U G A L Implementation: QUIPU 7.0 Master DSA: Zebu DSAs: 1 Organisations: 1 Entries: 10 S P A I N Implementation: QUIPU 7.0 Master DSA: Iguana DSAs: 5 Organisations: 10 Entries: 170 S W E D E N Implementation: QUIPU 7.0 Master DSAs: Hummingbird DSAs: 6 Organisations: 37 Entries: 19,000 S W I T Z E R L A N D Implementation: QUIPU 7.0 Master DSA: Chinchilla DSAs: 9 Organisations: 7 Master Entries: 24,152 U N I T E D K I N G D O M MasterDSA: Giant Tortoise DSAs: 48 Organisations: 40 Entries: 54,387 U N I T E D S T A T E S Implementations: QUIPU 7.0, CUSTOS Master DSA: Alpaca DSAs: 117 Organisations: 78 Entries: 227,263 Y U G O S L A V I A Implementation: QUIPU 6.8 Master DSA: None DSAs: 0 S U M M A R Y EUROPE DSAs Orgs Entries Europe 3 3 1,000 Austria 3 18 1,516 Belgium 1 1 8 Denmark 2 340 920 Finland 16 17 11,316 France 10 11 1,015 Germany 23 130 7,237 Greece - - - Iceland 1 28 250 Ireland 1 1 1,500 Israel 1 1 10 Italy 2 2 20 Luxembourg - - - Netherlands 3 7 2,128 Norway 9 426 15,934 Portugal 1 1 10 Spain 5 10 170 Sweden 6 37 19,000 Switzerland 9 7 24,152 United Kingdom 48 40 54,387 Yugoslavia - - - --------------------------- TOTAL 144 1,080 140,573 THE WORLD DSAs Orgs Entries Australia 23 29 30,231 Brazil 1 - - Canada 11 11 21,285 Japan 13 13 2,100 New Zealand 1 1 100 United States 117 78 227,263 --------------------------- TOTAL 166 132 280,979 GRAND TOTAL 310 1,212 421,552 3. Country Reports A U S T R A L I A The AARNet Directory Project has been in existence officially for nearly a year, and is currently preparing a report on Directory Services to the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee (AVCC) and the AARNet community, which will be presented at the forthcoming Australian Networkshop in Hobart in December 1991. During 1991 the Australian DIT has grown enormously. This growth has not only come from the project member institutions, giving confidence that this growth will continue as more organisations within the AARNet community choose to run their own DSAs. A number of different machines are currently being used to support the Directory in Australia, some of which (such as the Directory Project machines) are dedicated to this task. The Directory Project members use Digital's DS-3100s, but also SUNs, a Solbourne and even a Mac running AUX are used by other organisations in Australia. Currently QUIPU is the only implementation used, but it is hoped that Unisys, using their own DSA over a pure OSI stack, will be welcomed to the pilot soon. A QUIPU DSA was demonstrated at the Townsville Winter workshop in July using a local DIT of around 200 people, connected into the national DIT. For this demonstration a new attribute type was created, using simple encoding and public domain software to display the images. Around 100 colour photographs were captured on a Apple Macintosh II via a S-VHS video camera. The picture images were then converted on the Macintosh before being transferredd to the DECstation for final conversion. A typical 2" by 3" colour photograph rendered with 200 colours occupied around 70kbyte of disk, and took about 5 seconds to display locally on a range of hosts and X-terminals. Although display over the WAN wasn't feasible, it has to be stressed that colour imaging, like voice, is a very immediate way to grab peoples attention, and is a way of "selling" the directory that is really hard to beat. Despite being labour intensive, and somewhat clumsy, it is intended to repeat this demonstration in Hobart, hopefully incorporating direct video capture onto the DIT-hosting workstation. We have recently obtained an officially registered OID under the auspices of the AVCC and will be using this to encode new AARNet-wide attributes (as well as migrating our existing attributes) to supplement the Internet/COSINE attributes we are already using. Once we have decided on any new attributes we will attempt to promote them within the wider global Directory community. Standards Australia (SAA) has produced it's own standard for directory naming, and AARnet intend adopting this structure as much as possible. To this end AARnet intend applying to SAA for bulk registration of all Australian Universities to ensure that they can occupy the national namespace, as well as applying for a NSAP address and PRMD name for AARNet. To try to reduce traffic over the international link we have investigated the loads associated with "shadowing" the data for all of the QUIPU-based countries at the top level. This has revealed some shortcomings of the X.500 model, since without formally "slaving" the data, there is no way to permit other localised DUAs and DSAs to contact us, instead of the real owner. Also, the memory costs of this data are quite extreme, and it is feared that with other countries joining the Directory this can will become too cumbersome. However, AARnet will be shifting to formally slaving this data soon, which should reveal better patterns of usage of the link. Related to this, AARnet experiences wildly unreliable access to the JANET network via Giant Tortoise and False Cobra, and may try and avoid direct use of these servers where more reliable and faster-accessed DSAs exist in the United States. In early 1992, it is intended to produce an architecture neutral binary distribution kit for a range of "common" machines. Experience has shown many sites find it difficult to get started, especially those with limited exposure to ISODE and the Directory. By producing binary kits we hope that many more sites will be able to easily install the system and investigate the benefits of Directory Services. AARnet would like to particpate more within the various Directory working groups, but the time and cost of travel makes this prohibitive. Video conferencing is seen as a solution, but only once there is a more readily available technology. A U S T R I A Austria runs three QUIPU DSAs. The master DSA for Austria is located in Graz and holds general information about all the universities in Austria. Additionally, it stores detailed information about the staff of the University of Technology in Graz, eg e-mail, addresses, phone and fax numbers, and postal addresses. The University of Vienna and the University of Technology in Vienna have had theirs own DSAs since October, and have started to gather and store information about their local staff. The X.500 project of ACONET is entering its second stage now. The first stage concentrated on the establishment of an X.500 service focussing on technical, functional and inter- communicational aspects. The second stage will focus on the development of an Information System for Universities, and so concentrate on organisational and structural issues as well as user interfaces: ACONET expects to have to develop its own user interface. The senior administration at the Graz University of Technology (the Rector and the Director) decided to establish an information service, with the purpose of giving the University as a whole the possibility of representing itself in an electronic way. The information system is therefore composed of contributions - for example, about institutes or the administration, which have to be delivered and maintained by these parties. Some parts of the information to be stored, and their structures respectively, are pre-defined and mandatory, others are optional and can be added freely. Fixed parts relate to: research, staff and education. Institutes of Graz University have had to deliver their research activities once every two years for paper publication. It should be possible in future to extract this information from the information system. The section on staff is to hold information about postal addresses, phone and fax numbers, and e-mail addresses. At the moment there exists no centralised information base about people who are paid by an institute autonomously, and so there is no chance to get their phone numbers or e-mail addresses. The information base on an institute's educational activities is intended to comprise at least the title of lessons, seminars with details such as where, at what time and by whom they are given as well as descriptions of course content and subject matter. Questionnaires are to be distributed to be filled in by the institutes on a regular basis on behalf of the Ministry of Research. Graz is also considering storing information with relevance to the international projects "TRACE" and "ERASMUS" All the above information will be stored in a way, that it can be read by Hyper-G-Systems, and on a system that can read Hyper-G-Information in a limited way. Additionally there will be a Hyper-G-Interface to the Graz information system, based on the considerable work already done on this at Graz. With the intention of making this information system available in the X.500-world, Graz will provide a sort of gateway to X.500, able to offer all or at least essential data of the local information system to X.500. This particular software will be required to extract information from the information system and convert it into an X.500-form notation. B E L G I U M The HELIOS group at the University of Brussels (ULB) are running a QUIPU DSA which is reachable over X.25, and since the end of July have mastered the country entry for Belgium. There are plans to run IP on top of X.25 between ULB and the University of Leuven (KUL), who have international IP connectivity. KUL are also setting up a QUIPU DSA, and, if all goes well KUL will be the slave DSA for Belgium. BIM are interested in running a DSA and will soon participate in the pilot, as well as a number of small/medium size enterprises (SMEs). DG XIII of the European Commission is currently installing the PARADISE DSA/DUA package, which is based on QUIPU 7.0. It is hoped that they will soon be able to join the PARADISE pilot. B R A Z I L The first Interamerican Networking Workshop took place in the first week of October in Rio de Janeiro, and attracted representatives from a host of Latin American countries. At the moment, the primary concerns of this group are to get a global policy in transport protocols and electronic mail systems. However, though it's too early for real interamerican X.500 projects, a great deal of interest in ISODE and X.500 was shown at the Networkshop among people from Brazil and Argentina. Some of them had already worked with ISODE 6.8, and recently upgraded to ISODE 7.0. A representative from Spain configured a DSA and DUA over TCP/IP in a SUN Workstation, and was able to make a connection to the global Directory via DAP from Rio to a DSA in Madrid, and so look at the DIT. This DSA was configured to simulate c=BR, and it is hoped that in Brazil at least, the rapid evolution of interest in Directory Services, including the development of prorietary X.500 implementations, will generate some university-based projects leading to a more comprehensive approach to piloting by mid 1992. C A N A D A The ONet (Ontario Regional Research Network) pilot distributed Directory System project currently involves the central computing organisations at the University of Western Ontario, the University of Waterloo, Queens University and York University. The major purpose of the pilot is to allow users at any participating site to access Directory information at all other participating sites, using their local Directory system as an interface. The hope is that we can expand this service to a general offering for all ONet members. As part of the project, The University of Western Ontario took over the operation of the Canadian DSA from University of Toronto who were unable to continue its support. The pilot study is exploring the interactions between various X.500 implementations (at least QUIPU and CUSTOS) as well as experimenting with various user interfaces. A major part of the study's purpose is to discover mechanisms at the various participant sites to feed corporate data into the X.500 database. The long term direction may be towards using the X.500 Directory as the "master" database for certain kinds of corporate data. ONet also hope to explore various protection mechanisms with the intention of only providing a subset of internal Directories to external users where appropriate. D E N M A R K Two DSAs are running in Denmark over TCP/IP. The root DSA is run by DKnet and masters 340 organisational members of DKUUG (Danish Unix Users Group) along with the contact persons for each organization. The other DSA is a second-level DSA running at the Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen, and masters information about 576 students and employees. A public Directory access point has been established at login.dkuug.dk (129.142.96.43, login: ds). The DUAs available are DISH, FRed and SD. The PARADISE DUA, de, will replace this access point in the near future. The Directory can also be accessed by sending electronic mail to a mail-responder at the address ds@dkuug.dk. Danish organisations wishing to register in the Directory or connect own DSAs to the Danish pilot should contact the above address. Further information can also be obtained there. E U R O P E After much discussion in the PARADISE Operations group (POPS), it was decided in July 1991 to pilot an experimental locality node, l=Europe at the country level in the DIT below the ROOT. The intention of l=Europe was to enable supranational European organisations or associations to register in their "natural" place in the Directory. The current entries under l=Europe are: o the COSINE project, which, though its management unit, the CPMU, are based in Amsterdam, is effectively a pan-European association of national governmental and policy group representatives, as well as national IXI, MHS and X.500 managers and contact points. Also included in the o=COSINE, entry are details of COSINE sub-projects and services, and the CPMU. In addition to this European entry, it is intended that each COSINE country in Europe should register beneath the country level an entry for COSINE, giving specific details of its national COSINE representatives and service managers. o ESPRIT projects: a request was made by the Compulog project, co-ordinated by ECRC in Munich, to register its consortium details in the X.500 Directory under l=Europe as this was both a more logical and natural domain for a multi-national projects to be located. The SAM (Speech Assessment Methodologies) project, based at University College London, completed its consortium entry of 28 laboratories across eight countries, including Norway and Sweden. As part of its demonstration at ESPRIT Conference Week, the PARADISE project will be encouraging ESPRIT consortia to register their projects under this node. o the European Space Agency (ESA) commisioned BRINE S.A. to prototype an X.500 Directory based on QUIPU to contain in the first place an organisation chart for the ESA Operations Directorate and for administrative staff located at ESOC in Darmstadt, as well as a network administration directory for ESAinet, its IP-based operations network. ESA has four main sites: Paris (HQ), Darmstadt (ESOC), Noordewijk (ESTEC) and Frascati (ESRIN); tracking locations on about six locations mainly in Europe, and a number of small regional offices. ESA have plans to run an experimental pilot before concluding whether to scale up to a full operational directory service across the whole of the ESA network. The success and problems inherent in providing this service will be reviewed on a regular basis by the PARADISE project. F I N L A N D The Finnish master DSA is based at the Tampere University of Technology and runs QUIPU 7.0 over the Internet on behalf of FUNET, the Finnish University and Research Network Project. The Finnish Directory contains the five universities, two technical universities, Hewlett Packard, VTKK (the Finnish PTT, headquarters in Helsinki), the Technical Research Centre of Finland (VTT) at Espoo and several small commercial organisations. VTT Telecommunications Laboratory have developed a Unix-based X.500 DSA called CVOPS (C-language Virtual Operating System) with its own DUA. To date, this implementation is not connected to the PARADISE pilot, though it is known to interwork successfully with QUIPU. Telecom Finland are subcontracted to PTT Telecom, UCL's subcontractors in the PARADISE project. F R A N C E PARADISE activities are closely related to the ARISTOTE association, in the sense that some members of this association, which includes academic and industrial research organisations, decided in June 1991 to set up a working group devoted to X.500 technology. This working group was originally created by members of the already existing MHS working group with the aim of applying Directory Services to the X.400 area as a medium term goal. However, such has been the interest that already a much wider range of applications are now being considered. ARISTOTE, by and large, is deeply concerned by the exploration of practical usage of products implementing international standards. In the same vein, OPAX (Operation Pilote X.500 dans le cadre Aristote) is currently investigating applications of Directory Services such as: o the registration of university campus networks; o the registration of networked devices together with their owners's identity for various types of system and network admninistration; o Network Information Centres (NICs) support; o application of hypertext-like facilities to Directory User Agents; o support for documents archiving and retrival; One of the first exercises attempted by OPAX was to create a White Pages service within the OPAX working group itself, and the French Unix Users' Group which is conducting a similar project. This simple service has the extreme advantage of being both a practical playground for getting technical understanding of the technology as well as providing a useful service at the same time. Potentially, French organisations participating in the PARADISE/OPAX effort will be heavy users of Directory Services in the very near future. As such, the OPAX working group has taken a very proactive role in the process of enabling the transfer of research activities into the industrial world: offering X.500 tutorials, organising multi-vendor demonstrations, and putting a lot of effort into interoperability testing of existing products. OPAX members are today using three different commercial or public domain implementations of X.500 protocols and more are expected in the very near future. OPAX also aims to provide guidance in two directions: o as representing a non-negligible community of users, it wishes to express these users' needs in influencing the development of products towards these needs: users know which features they need. To some extent OPAX wishes to make sure that commercial products will satisfy these needs; o as an early user of Directory Services, the OPAX working group will gain some skill in administering and operating these services in a research environment. This knowledge should then later be taken into account when private operators start offering X.500 services on a commercial basis. Participating in a European wide project is also a serious means of exercising OPAX members' skills and extending them. It is also an ideal way of sharing views, results and opportunities. The so-called universality of the Directory needs yet to be proved and experimented with: whilst European and worldwide piloting of X.500 will certainly highlight the many positive aspects of the technology, it will also underline and demonstrate its deficiencies which need to be understood as soon as possible. The OPAX project now has ten DSAs: six are know to be stable and operational, whilst the other four are used as test DSAs. A public DUA is now in pre-operational phase and can be reached at the X121 address 2080-42060408211. The number of entries is estimated to be over than 1,000, though no practical test has been made to estimate this figure with any greater accuracy. It is hoped that a larger service will be deployed at the beginning of 1992. The French subtree currently contains entries for AFUU, Telecom Paris, INRETS, INRIA, CNET, REUNIR, CICB, CNRS, EDF, E3X and EMSE. Plans exist to involve French universities in the pilot, drawing on the experience of other university piloting in Europe. G E R M A N Y The VERDI projects (VERDI = VERteiltes DIrectory) are funded by the German Ministry for Research and Technology as a DFN (Deutsche Forschungnetz) project, and carried out by the GMD. These projects were given the task of building up a pilot distributed directories service within the DFN, with the intention that it become a general use service at the end of 1992. The VERDI 1 and VERDI 2 projects lasted until June 1989; VERDI 3 will finish in July 1993. The aims of the project are to: o pilot X.500 in the DFN; o produce a requirements analysis; o evaluate Directory Service support for MHS, FTAM and other DFN services; o make an evaluation of X.500 products/software; o enable the establishment of a Directory Service in Germany; o establish a common DFN Directory Service (most DFN members are running DSAs or are registered in the Directory) There has been no DSA development within the project, as either avaliable software (QUIPU) or other vendors' products are to be used. However, there has been development of a graphical user agent for linking the Directory to ONTOS (object oriented database) at GMD Birlinghoven, as well as the development of a user agent for linking MTA systems to the Directory providing global availability of updated routing tables, and searching for O/R addresses within the Directory. The German Directory subtree is based on two central QUIPU 7.0 DSAs at GMD Berlin and Birlinghoven on a SUN SparcServer 330 with 64 kbit X.25 (IXI) and Internet access. There is also a central DUA service offering different User Interfaces available at IXI address 204362430303. Mail access to the Directory is provided via special MHS-UA at O/R-Address: s=ds-server;ou=fokus;ou=berlin;p=gmd;a=dbp;c=de DFN also runs a telephone helpdesk on +49 30 254 99 232. In addition to the central machines there are 19 other QUIPU DSAs (based on releases 6.1, 6.8, and 7.0) at universities in the west part of Germany as well as many universities and research organisations in the east part of Germany which are expected to participate in the pilot project with 15 or more QUIPU 7.0 DSAs. Some of the organisational data in the German Directory is incomplete as it is derived from an old DFN nameserver, and not yet administered by organisations themselves. At present the only implementation being used is QUIPU on both SUN and HP-9000/HP-UX platforms, though SNI (Siemens/Nixdorf)) have been invited to participate with their products. As long as the Directory service is funded by DFN, there is no cost for service users. Usage statistics are collected for the two backbone DSAs with a tool from UCL. The Deutsche Bundespost are not currently involved in the pilot project, but have plans for provision of X.500 services in the future. G R E E C E The ARIADNE project is still hoping to start a Directory pilot for Greece at the beginning of 1992 on behalf of its network of 50 universities and research institutes across the country. I C E L A N D Since late 1989, Iceland has beeen running its single DSA on a SUN 3/60 at the University of Iceland. The implementation used is QUIPU 6.8 and there is access via the Internet. The DSA, which masters c=IS, holds 28 organisations and about 250 entries. However, because of the lack of good DUAs, there is little use made of the Directory. Although there is no pilot project or funding for X.500 in Iceland, work is being carried out on the implementation of registration and query options to the Elm mail system. I T A L Y CNUCE/CNR have plans to run a QUIPU-based pilot directory service for Italy on behalf of GARR, the Italian Research and Academic network. In November 1991, using a SUN Sparc IPC, they took over the management the c=IT node from Systems Wizards, the Ivrea- based company who are running an experimental DSA with their own implementation DirWiz. The CNUCE activity will be part of the establishment of a Network Information Service (NIS) for GARR and CNUCE is currently organising a group of people who will look after this project in Pisa. This will be carried out as a specific task of the CNR (Consiglio Nazionale di Ricerca), a GARR member organisation. Generally speaking, CNR is goverment funded, but at present there is no specific budget for the NIS activity. There is an agreement with another GARR member, CSATA, located in Bari, to carry out X.500 experimentation. CSATA have their own X.500 implementation running on a Hewlett Packard machine, which at the moment shows a number of incompatibilities interworking with QUIPU. It is hoped that another GARR member organization in Bologna will join the pilot once it is started, and manage their own QUIPU DSA below c=IT. CNUCE expect their country-level DSA to be operational before the end of 1991. Since CNUCE also are the same group running the Italian Internet Domain Name Server (top level), it is their intention to experiment using X.500 to store domain information. They would also like to exploit the capabilities of X.500 for storing information about network services, databases, yellow pages services etc, in conjuntion with database experts. CSELT, in Turin, participate in the CTS2 Project by providing a reference X.500 DSA for both DSP and DAP Conformance Testing. I R E L A N D The root node for Ireland consists of the cn=Irish Elk DSA operated on a voluntary basis by Donal O'Mahony of Trinity College Dublin. It joined the PARADISE pilot in April 1991 by using a locally ported version of ISODE to access the global Directory via the IXI network from an ULTRIX machine. Some months later, the availablity of an Internet connection allowed access over both networks simultaneously, but upgrading to QUIPU 7.0 meant that traffic was restricted to Internet-only for an interim period. The DSA is now being migrated to a SUN with X.25 access which will allow c=IE to be accessed over Internet, IXI, Janet and international X.25 networks. Two additional DSAs are expected to operate under c=IE once this is achieved. Over the last six months, the number of "people" entries stored under c=IE has grown from 30 to over 1500, together with over 100 photograph attributes. The absence of funding, however, has meant that coverage cannot be extended outside of the local site. Trinity College Dublin has been selected to pilot the use of combined X.400 User agents and Directory User Agent software as part of the national X.400 pilot work. This will involve the addition of more entries and MHS-related information. It is hoped that in the coming six months, c=IE will grow to at least three or four DSAs and up to 3,000 entries. Enhanced network connectivity coupled with the increased reliability of QUIPU 7.0 should have a dramatic improvement on availability. The integration with the X.400 pilot work will establish the Directory as an integral part of a mainstream networking service which will provide the user-demand required for full service provision. I S R A E L The Israeli X.500 pilot project is intended to provide directory services for the academic community. The master DSA, named Dorcan Gazelle, is a QUIPU 7.0 implementation, and is run on a DEC ULTRIX machine with TCP/IP connectivity at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The Israeli DSA is connected to the PARADISE pilot, and information in this DSA is accessible from any DUA. Most of the DUA interfaces available from ISODE 7.0 have been checked on different machines. They can be connected to the pilot, and one can access the information on any pilot entry. There are still problems using X window-based DUA interfaces with dxwm - the DECwindows Window Manager. At the moment the Israeli Directory subtreee is a prototype, and contains only a few entries. Once legal approval is obtained to set up the system, it is hoped to incorporate most members of the Israeli academic community. J A P A N X.500 Directory experimentation began as a project in May 1991, and is coordinated by the ISODE Working Group of the WIDE Project. Currently, 13 organisations are participating in the pilot, and, as of the first week in November, Japan joined the international pilot. One of the more important topics in the WIDE project is the handling of the Japanese charactor set in X.500. Currently, they use T.61 with ISO 2022, and, after making a simple modification of QUIPU, are designing attributes in Japanese. The project is planning to build a directory service for software information of anonymous ftp and to manage dynamic information with other network applications. There is also interest in experimenting with X.400 and FTAM. On the commercial front, both Hitachi and Fujitsu are developing their own X.500 implementations. L U X E M B O U R G The Luxembourg national educational network, RESTENA (Reseau Teleinformatique de l'Education Nationale), are currently setting up connections to other networks, and intend to start an X.500 pilot project in 1992. RESTENA have installed an X.400 system on a VAX (MRX400), and are reachable over IXI by the COSINE MHS. They will probably become a node of the WIN next year. The study carried out by Logica (UK) on behalf of DG IX of the European Commision is now concluded, having carried out some partially successful interworking tests using Siemes and ICL software. As a result of this study, there are plans for some experimental piloting in 1992. T H E N E T H E R L A N D S The Dutch pilot X.500 Directory Services project based at SURFnet ended on 30 September 1991, and, as was predicted in the May 1991 PARADISE report, the project was not able to achieve two of its intended goals: o create a multi-product X.500 infrastructure; o perform a small data management test. Its achievement was a technical infrastructure currently comprising three DSAs all of which are QUIPU-based. In the meantime a follow-up project proposal for a three year pilot, mainly concentrating on data management and interworking of multi-product X.500, has been approved. This project will start 1 January 1992. Funding has also been found to keep the Dutch master DSA up-to-date, and active within the PARADISE project in the intermediate period up to the start of the new X.500 pilot project. PTT Telecom (the Netherlands), subcontractors to UCL and so part of the PARADISE project, will also participate in the new Dutch X.500 pilot project. N O R W A Y UNINETT provides OSI, TCP/IP and DECnet based services to research and educational organisations in Norway. UNINETT is organised as a project under the Royal Ministry of Education and Research, but is expected to be reorganized as a foundation in the near future. UNINETT currently has approximatly 80 member organisations with an estimated 10,000 users connected to the network. UNINETT has been activly working to establish a national academic directory service since 1988. In November 1991, 45 of its member organisations had registered basic organisational information in the Directory and given local users of electronic mail access to the Directory. Through the user interfaces UNINETT provides, between 300 to 600 queries are seen per week. During the last 18 months approximately 1200 people have used the directory service themselves. A conclusion based on the variety of queries being put forward is that the Directory is actively being used within UNINETT for finding white pages information. The Norwegian directory currently contains information on over 400 organisations. The majority of these are public service organisations, as well as governmental and regional bodies that have been bulkloaded into the directory. This information is maintained centrally, and the fact that there is no further information associated with the organisations is clearly indicated. The UNINETT member organisations that register themselves have to provide basic directory information on their organisations; users are then free to register personal information through a mail responder. Currently more than 1000 of the person entries have been entered in the Directory by individuals themselves through the mail responder. In addition to this method of data management, one university has established a scheme to maintain and manage its directory entry updated with information on its employees. As well as providing white pages information, the Norwegian directory also contains information on distribution lists. The contents of the interest-groups file - a widely used collection of references to distribution lists - has been loaded into the Directory. (It can be found under c=NO, o=Distribusjonslister.) Because of the way this information has been structured, it is available through user interfaces currently being used for the white pages directory service. The main tool used by end-users to access and update information in the Directory is a mail responder developed by UNINETT which has in use since April 1990. It was originally developed as a replacement for the EAN electronic mail directory server. The format used for the request messages is a superset of the format used by EAN, while the responses have been completly reworked. The responses are quite "textual" which it is believed has proved a success. The naming scheme used is a three-level heirarchy: person, organisation, country. In addition UNINETT has developed a Unix-program, simply called "directory", which provides Unix-users with the same set of EAN-type commands. This program also contains quite a lot of documentation and hints for new Directory users. For users to whom neither of these options are available, comprehensive documentation on how to formulate queries to the mail responder is available. Some organisations also let their users have access to the interactive user interfaces available in the ISODE package. The University of Oslo has incorporated usage of the Directory into their electronic mail to fax gateway. When messages pass through the gateway, information based on the sender is found from the Directory based on their electronic mail address, so allowing information from their Directory entry can be used on the cover page of the fax message. UNINETT's medium term goal is to build a national academic white pages directory service containing information on all persons associated with UNINETT member organisations. It is anticipated that, as its understanding grows, additional goals for using the Directory will be formulated. UNINETT has developed a two-phased strategy to acheive its goals for a white pages service. These phases characterise how each organisation will relate itself to the Directory. Through the first phase, each UNINETT member organisation can make available the Directory service to all its users of electronic mail without the need for any local competence in X.500. Users at organisations that are in this phase will have the ability to look up information in the directory and to register personal information. These services are realised by the central mail responder operated by UNINETT. Directory information for organisations in this phase will be stored by UNINETT in one of its backbone DSAs. To enter phase one, organisations have to register their basic organisational information in the Directory by completing and returning a UNINETT pro forma. After the information has been entered into the Directory, UNINETT sends a package with information material, including suggestions for promoting the Directory to local users, to the organisation. UNINETT currently strongly encourages all its member organisations to enter this phase. It is expected that as each organisation's competence in and experience with the Directory grows, they will want to proceed to more advanced usage of the Directory. Organisations in phase two will give all local computer users access to interactive user-interfaces, and also make sure that information about all employees is made available: they are also expected to run their own DSA. UNINETT is currently developing tools to support organisations in phase two, and it is expected that they will be available in the near future. These tools includes interactive user interfaces, tools to do data-maintainance and tools to install and run a DSA. UNINETT is also developing a Macintosh user-interface to the Directory (dubbed "AddressFinder"), and a screen orienter, cursor-based program to manually maintain data in the Directory. The basis for these tools is a C++-based DAP programmers interface developed by UNINETT. A binary distribution of QUIPU as well as a tool to oversee QUIPUs operation has also been developed. The University of Oslo has developed tools to bulk-load information into the Directory, and it is hoped that UNINETT can use this software as a basis for a general tool at a later stage. UNINETT has solved the relevant legal issues when operating a directory service, and produced a report discussing the issues. The UNINETT white pages directory service is an operational service with significant usage. Providing an easy way to start using the Directory for organisations at the same time as reaching a large number of users has proved to be a success. It is expected that interactive usage of the Directory will pick up in the six months up to May 1992, and that a number of organisations will organise registration of employes in the Directory. P O R T U G A L The Portuguese Pilot Directory Project is managed at the University of Minho, Data Communications Centre of the Department of Informatics, under a contract with FCCN (Fundacao de Calculo Cientifico Nacional), the National Foundation in charge of the Portuguese R&D Network (RCCN). The Pilot Directory Project formally started on 1 October 1991, and its plan consists of four phases: o the installation of a master DSA for Portugal, local connectivity tests with DSP and DAP protocols, interfaces with e-mailers and connection to the PARADISE pilot (October - November, 1991); o preparation phase: the definition of the DIT structure, collection of information for the pilot service on a limited and selected scope and the gathering of experience in the management of the service (November 1991 - February 1992); o distribution phase: set-up of DSAs in other sites (Universities and R&D Laboratories) and connectivity tests (February - June 1992); o production phase: use in the RCCN (July 1992 - ...) The master DSA for Portugal is already connected to the global Directory as of the beginning of November. To date it only maintains one organisation (University of Minho) with a few local entries. Work is now progressing in the following areas: o e-mail access to the Directory (starting with the use of the EAN nameserver commands and similar Unix scripts for SendMail); and o the set-up of DUAs for anonymous access from the RCCN. These two services will be made available as a pilot during November and December. S P A I N The Spanish directory pilot has been running since March 1990 through the IRIS program which is a part of the national research and development plan and funded by the government of Spain. The pilot has evolved through various stages of development to facilitate the distribution of this new service among all IRIS' university and research institutions. It became fully operational in May 1991. IRIS' strategy was to site SUN 4/330's in places with good communication links, and at present, IRIS manages four DSAs in Spain: o Madrid, at IRIS headquarters o Barcelona (Cataluna) where there is a metropolitan network connecting the city's three universities; o Sevilla (Andalucia) which has a regional network; o Tenerife (Canary Islands), in the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, where there is a plan to build up a network connecting the astrophysics observatories and the University of La Laguna. In addtion the Spanish directory registers the University of the Balearic Islands, an Institute of Astronomy in Guadalajara, CIEMAT in Madrid, as well as an entry for Concurrent Computer Corporation who are registered elsewhere in the Directory under several other countries (United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Netherlands, and Australia). The information currently held in the Directory is still limited but is expected to grow rapidly with the inclusion of other centres, and efforts are being made to improve the quality of data in the present Directory entries. S W E D E N SUNET, the Swedish University Network, has for some years been running an X.500 pilot, but now feels that the time is ripe to provide something more like a service. To this end SUNET has recently put forward a proposal for implementing such a service. The way that SUNET has chosen to start is by using a small number of backbone DSAs with responsibility for several University sites, whereby managers in each individual University can maintain and manage their own data. During spring 1992 additional backbone DSAs will be put in place, and each one will take responsibility for the universities within that region. From early autumn 1992, management tools will be made available for keeping organisational data up to date. From the beginning of this pilot service, SUNET will aim both at supplying its users with white pages information, but also study how X.500 can be used as a nameserver for NSAP's together with the DECdns servers. Today the Swedish master DSA is based at the Univerisity of Umea, and runs QUIPU 7.0 over public X.25 and Internet on behalf of SUNET, though soon both IXI and ISO CLNS will be available. At present the Swedish directory contains entries for everyone who is registered in the SUNET e-mail catalogue as well as the complete list of employees at the University of Umea and at the Chalmers University of Technology. This means that almost all large and small universities in Sweden are represented in the DIT. But, as only people with e-mail addresses are registered, except in the case of the University of Umea and the Chalmers University of Technology, so far the majority of people working at universities in Sweden are not in the directory. The intention is that this will change during 1992. A few research councils and other funding bodies plus some commercial companies are also represented in the Swedish directory. It also includes Televerket, the Swedish PTT, who are experimenting with their own X.500 implementation, Direct.500 which is only deployed within the company at present whilst experimentation is carried out. S W I T Z E R L A N D Since October 1991, SWITCH (the Swiss Academic and Research Network) has maintained the national part of the directory tree on its own machines. This job was taken over from a research group at ETH Zurich which is engaged in the development of new DSA and DUA concepts. SWITCH operates the national multi-protocol backbone with support of value added services on top, which today comprises mainly X.400 electronic mail. Since SWITCH actively promotes migration to OSI services where available, X.500 will be an important lever to support and glue the other applications and network services together. The national master DSA is connected to the Internet, public X.25 and to IXI, whereas the organisational DSAs have today either only Internet or public X.25 access. At present, there are seven operational DSAs, all running QUIPU 7.0, and two experimental DSAs. The platforms used are mainly SUN-3 and SUN-4 with SunNet X.25, but there is also a DECsystem 5800 and a microVax II, both with Ultrix. The research group at ETH Zurich has developed a QUIPU-derived DSA which implements the data storage component on top of a relational database management system (Oracle) to store locally managed data. The same group also developed a simplified DUA using HyperCard on the Macintosh. This DUA uses TCP/IP sockets to communicate with Dish running on a UNIX machine. It is specifically designed for the unexperienced user. It graphically assists them in navigating through the DIT and supports the possibility of formulating search queries without knowing any details about the information model. PTT Switzerland participates in the pilot by funding the X.500 research activities at SWITCH, and by actively co-operating with PTT Telecom, the Netherlands in PARADISE. They also maintain their own organisational DSA with data about employees. They store some data about electronic mailboxes and telephone users with a view to gaining experience in handling entries for residential persons. U N I T E D K I N G D O M The UK directory pilot is entirely QUIPU based at this time, with 28 DSAs running the latest version (ISODE 7.0). This has been partly facilitated by a set of upgrade scripts made available to UK Academic sites by X-Tel. In the past six months, there has been a 25% increase in the number of organisations represented in the pilot: 30 academic, eight industrial and two government (RAL, JNT) sites. Strangely, although the number of sites has increased, the number of entries at pilot sites has remained around the same, or dropped. This is partly due to an improved counting mechanism (data from long term unavailable DSAs is now not counted), and partly due to many sites undertaking data reorganisation in the light of experience. Some sites have had to remove data due to concerns about personal privacy issues, despite compliance with the UK Data Protection Act. The data available in the British directory is starting to include a number of application entities; for example, entries representing OSI FTAM services. The FTAM implementation in ISODE is being used on the UK academic network, and makes use of the information in the Directory to identify remote FTAM servers. X.400 Distribution lists are also being stored in the Directory, and can be expanded by the PP mail system. The UK pilot is heavily X.25 based, and so makes extensive use of the PARADISE DSA relay service to access DSAs on the Internet (95% of DSAs outside the United Kingdom are on the Internet). The converse is also true: the other pilots need to configure the relay service in order to access the UK pilot. It has been noted that in some cases this configuration is incorrect. Ways of easing configuration are being looked at, and suggestions will be fed back into the development of QUIPU. If other pilots are not based upon QUIPU software, use of a relay may not be possible. The use of IXI in the UK pilot is increasing: 16 of the 35 DSAs in Europe with IXI access are in the UK. Wider European use of IXI would greatly enhance the visibility of the UK pilot. A pilot UK name registration authority has been set up called DISC. This enables organisations to register, amongst other things, Relative Distinguished Names (RDNs). This pilot will be monitored closely, and it may become a requirement for sites joining the pilot to show evidence of their DISC registration. At the beginning of November, British Telecom's research laboratories in Martlesham expressed interest in running a QUIPU DSA in the pilot. U N I T E D S T A T E S The FOX Project (Field Operational X.500) is funded by DARPA to provide a basis for operational X.500 deployment in the Internet. The role of the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) during the past several months has been to facilitate communication between the various FOX contractors and to formalize the highly dynamic FOX requirements. One of the most visible activities is the co-ordination and distribution of the Directory Services Activities Report (DSAR.) which reports on the activities of standards groups and pilot projects for X.500 directories throughout the US, and internationally through PARADISE. It is released each month in a self-contained edition as well as a subsection of the Internet Monthly. Merit have been busy with a number of FOX sub-projects. Perhaps the foremost of these is the development of numerous DIT entry types: o the Information Resource; o the K-12 Educational Resource; o the NIC Profile; and o the Site Contact record. These resources store phone numbers, addresses, physical and e-mail, and the names of key personnel for the entities which they define. While the initial implementations of these items are currently being revised, they can all be located in the DIT under @o=Internet. Other Merit work includes: o the development of an e-mail based query-and-update tool for K-12 and NIC Resources; o work with Dixie as a lightweight alternative to the DSA access protocol found in QUIPU; o the implementation of an automatic-alias-lookup feature for mail travelling through the Sprintmail gateway; and o the demonstration of Merit X.500 work at Interop '91. Performance Systems International (PSI) has been working on providing DIT support for RFCs and other documents. They have designed many tools for this purpose. The foremost of these are: o a tool to convert RFC-INDEX.TXT documents to EDB entries; and o the x5ftp tool which searches a portion of the DIT for document references, and subsequently retrieves the document, currently RFCs and FYIs. PSI also wrote the "usconfig" program, a modification of "dsaconfig" which has knowledge of NADF naming recommendations and produces US-specific configurations. SRI International has been heavily involved in providing X.500 access to DDN WHOIS information, a frequently used information resource in the Internet. SRI maintains this access through a DSA they operate as part of the White Pages Pilot Project. Recently, the responsibility for the DDN Network Information Centre transferred from SRI to Government Systems, Inc (GSI). SRI has begun work with GSI to keep the X.500 data up to date based on GSI's data. Converting DDN WHOIS data to X.500 has met with some compatibility problems. Specifically, the postalAddress attribute is insufficient for a large number (47%) of the WHOIS addresses. Alternatives are being investigated by SRI and the NIST OSI Directory Services SIG (Special Interest Group). SRI has also written a DUA to access the WHOIS data in X.500. Called X5WHOIS, it maintains an identical interface and nearly identical data to its NIC counterpart. X5WHOIS is currently running on an experimental basis at SRI. It can be accessed by o remote-WHOIS, ie "whois -h inic.nisc.sri.com ,"; or o telnet, ie "telnet inic.nisc.sri.com 43." The IETF OSI Directory Services convene for two basic purposes: o to report on the progress of various X.500 pilot projects; and o to develop RFC's and standards to guide the growth of X.500. In the past several months, OSI-DS has applied itself to: o numerous documents on various aspects of X.500, several of which will soon become RFCs. Currently, however, they are all Internet drafts, ie they are working documents only and subject to revision at any time. All of these documents are available by anonymous ftp from nic.nordu.net, ftp.nisc.sri.com and cs.ucl.ac.uk: o the creation of the Directory Information Services (pilot) Infrastructure Working Group (DISI) - see below. o the initiation of the Directory Services Activities Report (DSAR). Several issues continually recur in OSI-DS discussion and may find their way to RFCs in the near future. Perhaps the most central of these are: o the maintaining of experimental OID's (object identifiers); o mechanisms for user-friendly naming; o joint COSINE and Internet pilot requirements; o devising a strategic plan for deploying an Internet Directory Service; o DSA naming; o development of QOS (Quality of Service); o the new format for "photo" attributes; and o the incorporation of DNS (Domain Naming System) by the DIT (Directory Information Tree.) DISI was chartered in March, 1991 and its purpose is to facilitate deployment in the Internet of Directory Services based on implementations of the X.500 standards. DISI pursues this end by producing informational RFCs intended to serve as a Directory Services "Administrators Guide." These RFCs are intended to relate the current usage and scope of the X.500 standard and Directory Services in North America and the world. They will contain information on the procurement installation and operation of various implementations of the X.500 standard. DISI has turned out an Internet-Draft entitled "A Catalog of Available X.500 Implementations." Co-authored by SRI and LBL, this document is useful to those responsible for obtaining and installing an appropriate X.500 implementation. A second paper, an "Executive Introduction to X.500", was written and reviewed at the July IETF DISI meeting. Co-authored by JvNCNet, ISI and MERIT, it was withdrawn for revisions as it tended to blur the distinction between X.500 and QUIPU. The third document mentioned in the charter, on "Advanced Usages", was put on hold as it was decided that two other documents needed to be produced first: o "How to Join a Pilot Project"; and o "How to Set up a DSA". The writing assignments for these two papers have not yet been made. The PSI White Pages Pilot Project continues to grow at a linear rate, with 78 organizations currently participating in the pilot. In the past few months, the pilot has seen a number of changes: o an upgrade to QUIPU 7.0; o a transition to the naming scheme proposed by the NADF; o the rehoming of the Fruit Bat DSA to help with robustness problems. As experience is gained with the deployment of X.500-based Directory Services in the Internet, it is anticipated that further changes will occur. Pilot system robustness continues to be a problem, with some sections of the DIT in the US suffering from chronic unavailibility problems. To this end, in parallel with the transitions being performed in the pilot, problems that detract from pilot robustness are being studied by the sponsors to identify areas that may require further work. Specific work being done in this area include: o the moving of the Fruit Bat DSA; o the insertion of knowledge information into the c=US entry to facilitate the use of the multi-valued referral capability of the QUIPU; and o systematic probing of pilot DSAs in order to determine availability. The North American Directory Forum (NADF) met twice in 1991 - in San Francisco in July, and in Bethesda, Maryland in October. At these meetings, discussions on a future Directory Service were held, with agreements being reached on naming and data sharing. NADF members have also agreed to stage an experimental pilot, in which all members will participate, to test these, and other agreements reached during the forum's quarterly meetings. At the last NADF meeting, the NADF also began examining security and privacy issues related to the offering of directory services, with a new subgroup being formed that will focus on such issues. The revised version of NADF-175 has been released as an informational RFC. The OSI Implementor's Workshop (OIW) has met regularly with more vendors than users participating. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is involved in several X.500 activities: standards, pilot deployment and the development of an X.500 implementation, Custos. The objective is to see X.500 widely deployed and used in the US government. NIST and GSA are collaborating in the creation of a US government X.500 deployment. Significant progress has been made towards refining a draft schema developed by NIST. Once the schema is complete, agencies will begin collecting data for loading into the Directory. Initially, NIST will offer to host agency data on Custos DSAs running at NIST. Eventually, agencies are expected to obtain and operate their own DSAs. The NIST X.500 public-domain implementation, Custos, is implemented on ISODE, although it otherwise bears no relation to QUIPU. One of its more interesting features is that the DBMS interface is SQL, and a simple DBMS is provided as part of Custos to support the DSA. Information can be optionally loaded into memory, and the memory usage is reasonably efficient on a per-entry basis. NIST has released Custos version 0.1.1 for beta-testing purposes. It implements the read, add, compare and list operations, along with a significant amount of "infrastructure" code that applies to all operations. It facilitates DAP interoperability with QUIPU, and the OSIWARE X.500 product. Search, access control and schema management are currently under development. This is the additional functionality for Custos version 0.2, yet to be released. Y U G O S L A V I A The Directory project is in a "frozen" state. After an X.500 project was prepared some months ago and approved, providing money for an additional post and equipment, the war came and the plans were shelved. However, the project will probably be "unfrozen" in the new year, and it is hoped that real work will begin in January with funding approved for 1992 and 1993. In 1992 it is hoped to set up a QUIPU DSA for two organisations - the Jozef Stefan Institute and the University of Ljubljana, with approximately 2000 entries. The Slovenian PTT is also interested, and in 1992 they will examine closely the pilot project and prepare a study about the suitability of data to be included in their own future Directory. It is unclear at the moment about the activities of a group at the University of Zagreb, or the interests of a similar group in the Inter University Centre, Dubrovnik.