7 INTERNET-DRAFT Kurt D. Zeilenga
8 Intended Category: Standard Track OpenLDAP Foundation
9 Expires: 26 December 2001 26 June 2001
12 Feature Discovery in LDAP
13 <draft-zeilenga-ldap-features-01.txt>
18 This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with all
19 provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026.
21 This document is intended to be, after appropriate review and
22 revision, submitted to the RFC Editor as an Standard Track document.
23 Distribution of this memo is unlimited. Technical discussion of this
24 document will take place on the IETF LDAP Extension Working Group
25 mailing list <ietf-ldapext@netscape.com>. Please send editorial
26 comments directly to the author <Kurt@OpenLDAP.org>.
28 Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task
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30 groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts.
31 Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
32 and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
33 time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
34 material or to cite them other than as ``work in progress.''
36 The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at
37 <http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt>. The list of
38 Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at
39 <http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html>.
41 Copyright 2001, The Internet Society. All Rights Reserved.
43 Please see the Copyright section near the end of this document for
49 LDAP [RFC2251] is an extensible protocol with numerous elective
50 features. LDAP provides mechanisms for a client to discover supported
51 protocol versions, controls, extended operations, SASL mechanisms, and
52 subschema information. However, these mechanisms are not designed to
53 support general feature discovery.
58 Zeilenga draft-zeilenga-ldap-features-01 [Page 1]
60 INTERNET-DRAFT LDAP supportedFeatures 26 June 2001
63 This document describes a simple, general-purpose mechanism which
64 clients may use to discovery the set of features supported by a
67 The key words ``MUST'', ``MUST NOT'', ``REQUIRED'', ``SHALL'', ``SHALL
68 NOT'', ``SHOULD'', ``SHOULD NOT'', ``RECOMMENDED'', and ``MAY'' in
69 this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119
73 2. Discovery of supported features
75 Each feature whose support may be discovered SHALL be identified by an
76 Object Identifier (OID). A server advertises its support for a given
77 feature by providing the OID associated with the feature as a value of
78 the supportedFeatures attribute held in the root DSE. A client may
79 examine the values of this attribute to determine if a particular
80 feature is supported by the server.
82 The supportedFeatures attribute type is described [RFC2252] as
85 ( 1.3.6.1.4.1.4203.1.3.5
86 NAME 'supportedFeatures'
87 DESC 'features supported by the server'
88 EQUALITY objectIdentifierMatch
89 SYNTAX 1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.115.121.1.38
93 3. Security Considerations
95 As rogue clients can discover features of a server by other means
96 (such as by trial and error), this feature discovery mechanism is not
97 believed to introduce any new security risk to LDAP.
102 This document is based upon input from the IETF LDAPext working group.
114 Zeilenga draft-zeilenga-ldap-features-01 [Page 2]
116 INTERNET-DRAFT LDAP supportedFeatures 26 June 2001
121 [RFC2219] S. Bradner, "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
122 Requirement Levels", RFC 2119, March 1997.
124 [RFC2251] M. Wahl, T. Howes, S. Kille, "Lightweight Directory Access
125 Protocol (v3)", RFC 2251, December 1997.
127 [RFC2252] M. Wahl, A. Coulbeck, T. Howes, S. Kille, "Lightweight
128 Directory Access Protocol (v3): Attribute Syntax
129 Definitions", RFC 2252, December 1997.
134 Copyright 2001, The Internet Society. All Rights Reserved.
136 This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
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142 document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
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154 ENGINEERING TASK FORCE DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED,
155 INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF THE
156 INFORMATION HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED
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170 Zeilenga draft-zeilenga-ldap-features-01 [Page 3]