Jacqueline Craig wanted to begin by talking about why we're doing this;
now that we have directory services, people can find addresses that way.
(Tom) It's more about publishing than searching--if a faculty member
publishes an e-mail address to a colleague or in a journal article, it
looks better if it's @Berkeley.EDU. uclink/socrates.berkeley.edu
creates an impression of division and factionalism. (Which may
actually be the case, but it still looks bad). This also applies to
staff and students publishing addresses.
JC suggests that we let uclink/LDAP create the policy. My opinion is
that we really don't need to care about uclink or CalNet's name space--it
actually will be easier to implement and maintain as a separate name space
than to coordinate with all these other services.
Jerry wanted to know, if we're using LDAP for lookups, whether the LDAP
server will have 24/7 support? Lucia says yes, they've had some reliability
problems but they're moving towards 24/7. I noted that the service almost
certainly wouldn't be doing LDAP lookups in real-time; you'd have some sort
of batch processing on a periodic basis that would grab the names out of
LDAP and create a standard Unix sendmail aliases file. Jerry posited that
you'll get complaints any time someone goes in and does an update that's
not immediately active. I rejoined that you could do a push when someone
does a database update.
We then began a debate on our two major conflicts:
1) Do we create a controlled namespace, or do we allow people to choose?
2) Do we create a clean namespace, or do we use/coordinate with an existing
one?
Tackling the first issue, we talked about the sort of inappropriate names
students and sometimes faculty choose, and basically agreed that we can't
protect people from themselves, and it's not a new problem since people
can choose their uclink account names now.
CalNet originally proposed an auto-assigned, controlled namespace for the
friendly CalNet login, and the EBITF rejected the idea.
There is still the issue of privacy of the CalNet login name; there's a
meeting of the CalNet steering committee to decide whether the CalNet login,
at 11:00 on Tuesday. [see below] We need to know if the CalNet login
is going to be private before we decide if we can coordinate with that
address space (which itself is coordinated with uclink).
The question came up of whether students need a friendly name; we
eventually agreed that they do, and came to a consensus that our
recommendation should be that everyone gets to choose their own address
(within constraints).
We also came to a consensus that we should coordinate with the
uclink/socrates/CalNet namespace (or at least, everyone else came to
a consensus, and I didn't want to hold up the process over the point).
The remaining question is whether CalNet will want their login names
to be private.
[Note: JC informed me later that day that the CalNet steering committee
decided the CalNet ID *should* be private. This appears to put the issue
back on the table, because we can't use the same namespace as CalNet if the
CalNet namespace is supposed to be private. It also seems impossible to me
for CalNet to both coordinate with the (public) uclink name space and keep
the name space private, but that's an issue for CalNet, not us.]
Next meeting will be Monday, 12/17, at 11:00 AM, in 261 Campbell Hall.
-- Tom Holub (tom_holub@LS.Berkeley.EDU, 510-642-9069) College of Letters & Science 249 Campbell Hall
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Dec 14 2001 - 16:10:32 PST