RFC 2148 (rfc2148) - Page 2 of 15
Deployment of the Internet White Pages Service
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 2148 Internet White Pages Service September 1997 (2) Internet Service providers SHOULD help smaller organizations follow this recommendation, either by providing services for hosting their data, by helping them find other parties to do so, or by helping them bring their own service on-line. (3) All interested parties SHOULD make sure there exists a core X.500 name space in the world, and that all names in this name space are resolvable. (National name spaces may elobarate on the core name space). The rest of this document is justification and details for this recommendation. The words "SHOULD", "MUST" and "MAY", when written in UPPER CASE, have the meaning defined in RFC 2119 [17] 2. Introduction The Internet is used for information exchange and communication between its users. It can only be effective as such if users are able to find each other's addresses. Therefore the Internet benefits from an adequate White Pages Service, i.e., a directory service offering (Internet) address information related to people and organizations. This document describes the way in which the Internet White Pages Service (from now on abbreviated as IWPS) is best exploited using today's experience, today's protocols, today's products and today's procedures. Experience [2] has shown that a White Pages Service based on self- registration of users or on centralized servers tends to gather data in a haphazard fashion, and, moreover, collects data that ages rapidly and is not kept up to date. The most vital attempts to establish the IWPS are based on models with distributed (local) databases each holding a manageable part of the IWPS information. Such a part mostly consists of all relevant IWPS information from within a particular organization or from within an Internet service provider and its users. On top of the databases there is a directory services protocol that connects them and provides user access. Today X.500 is the most popular directory services protocol on the Internet, connecting the address information of about 1,5 million individuals and 3,000 organizations. Whois++ is the second popular protocol. X.500 and Whois++ may also be used to interconnect other information than only IWPS information, but here we only discuss the IWPS features. Alvestrand & Jurg Best Current Practice
