RFC 1802 (rfc1802) - Page 2 of 11
Introducing Project Long Bud: Internet Pilot Project for the Deployment of X
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 1802 Introducing Project Long Bud June 1995 In the MHS infrastructure, as compared to other protocols, a name by itself does not contain enough information to allow the Message Transfer Agents (MTAs) to route a message to the User Agent (UA) servicing this name. The routing process is based on information provided by different MHS Management Domains, whether they are public or private. An MHS community combines several administrative MHS domains among which agreements for cooperative routing exist: the GO-MHS community is the set of MTA's taking care of X.400 mail operations on the Internet [RFC 1649]. In the absence of a distributed Directory Service, an interim technique has been developed within the GO-MHS community to collect and advertise routing information. This resulted in an experimental IETF protocol [RFC 1465]. 2. Rationale A number of routing problems are preventing the present Internet X.400 service from expanding its number of participating message transfer agents to a global scale. The two most critical problems are: * The present mechanism of centrally maintained and advertized MTA routing tables has been optimized as far as possible. Increasing the number of directly connected MTAs increases also the workload on the MHS managers. The current solution does not scale. Routing must be a fully dynamic and distributed process. * Manual propagation and installation of routing tables do not guarantee consistency of routing information (even in a loose fashion) when it is accessed by different MTAs scattered across the globe. It is commonly accepted that a distributed mechanism providing for dynamic updating and management of X.400 routing information is highly desirable. The focus of the project is to establish X.500- based support of X.400 routing, at a very large scale. 3. Benefits Using the Directory as a dynamic means of information storage and advertisement will guarantee participants in Project Long Bud that their updated data are globally available to the community. As a direct consequence of the above, a participating MHS manager will be released from configuring connections to the other participants. Alvestrand, et al Informational
