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CNN on Common Name Resolution Protocol

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the none-of-them-there-dot-slash-dot dept.

CamelMan wrote to us with an interesting story over at CNN. The Internet Engineering Task Force is apparently on a fast track to get the Common Name Resolution Protocol into place as early as next year. It will be, however, mostly aimed at intranets, and not at the Internet writ large.

9 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. Dumb Question by DonkPunch · · Score: 2

    Ok -- I promise to fire up the search engine and learn more on my own right after this. Is this some sort of LDAP extension or is it more like a standardized crawler/search engine combo? Sorry for my cluelessness.

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  2. Sounds like it would be for big ISP's too. by Gleef · · Score: 2

    I can picture Mindspring or (shudder) AOL setting up a CNR server for their users, so their users can access common sites and information sans URL. A mercenary ISP could even sell entries in their CNR database.

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  3. Re:Finally the chance to abolish WINS by Gleef · · Score: 2

    No, if you use SMB with NetBios, you still need WINS, no matter how many nifty tools you get on the internet side. If you want to dump WINS, dump Windows. If you can't do that, dump your Domain Controllers and install Samba on a Linux/BSD/Unix box. Samba's implementation of WINS integrates much better with internet naming systems.

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  4. Who was the author? by Zwack · · Score: 2

    It looks like the idea came forward from someone at realnames. I'm not particularly impressed with their idea. Just replace a URL with a simple text string... and whoever paid us most for that string will get the hit...

    I don't think that people have much trouble in using search engines... Why not just put a search engine on your intranet server and have the home page set to that server?

    It solves the problem of finding the 1996 budget report without knowing the URL... and it doesn't involve replacing browsers, adding in new servers or anything particularly complicated...

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  5. Is this REALLY all that beneficial? by casmithva · · Score: 2
    Not that I trust journalists -- technical and especially mainstream -- to accurately report on technical matters...

    The article implies that a local/intranet registry will have to be maintained describing the mappings between human friendly names and URLs. So instead of remembering URLs, users will have to remember how the thing's registered in the local registry, quite possibly in a way that's not intuitive to them. A user might want the 1998 budget report and look for "1998 Budget Report," but the finance people might've registered the document in the local registry with a title that's only intuitive to them (e.g., "1998 Expenditures"?) and others in their field. A title that's intuitive to person A in discipline A might not be all that intuitive to person B in another discipline. Sounds like we'd be back at square one rather quickly.

    There's a point at which we have to stop dumbing down computers and standards and start insisting on smarter users and smarter website maintainers (i.e., put a little thought into how documents and pages are organized). Perhaps we're reaching that point...

  6. Reality Check by the+red+pen · · Score: 2
    As entertaining as it is to see passionate debates on slashdot waged between people who don't really know what they're talking about, I thought I'd clear up some potential questions here.

    This is aimed at Intranets. Why? Because this is, in short, a way to connect web requests with a bunch of resources listed in a directory server such as an LDAP server, Novell Directory Server or Micro~1 Active Directory (coming soon to foolish corporations everywhere). "Common Name" or CN, is a standard part of X.400(?)/X.500(?) naming schema which are used in such directories. If you look at the contents of an X.509 certificate, you'll see it as part of a "Distinguished Name" or DN. Something's DN should uniquely identify it. For example, here are some DN's:

    • CN="George Bush" OU="Texas Governor" CO="Republic of Texas"

    • CN="George Bush" OU="Ex-President" CO="United States of America"
    So, allowing someone to type in a CN or partial DN into their browser is of interest to corporations in the near term, because many of them are already deploying Directory Services to centralize their information management.

    The "Common Name" proposal also contains RDF schemas to describe and search for documents based on CN's and partial DN's. This might have some applicability to widely distributed, nonarchic systems such as the web. Of course, RDF is a cutting-edge application of XML which isn't even fully ratified, so don't hold your breath.

  7. The purpose of the Common Name Resolution Protocol by lost_packet · · Score: 2
    from what I gather from the cnn story, is to make it easier for someone to find the information that they're looking for.
    ..."You won't have to remember the HTTP address. You can just call a document by its name,"... ... "Imagine a company like Boeing having a database of all the engineering documents for the F-22 fighter and being able to pull up documents by their regular names and not their URLs." ...
    if a company had a database for some set of information, say engineering documents, or phone numbers, or part numbers, or whatever, wouldn't it be fairly simple to just make a web interface to the database (.asp or cgi or perl etc...) so that an end user could just enter a keyword to search the database?

    I think that this protocol would lead to sloppier web site design. Yes, I've looked for information before and wound up on a page with alpha(-numeric-)bet soup for a URL, but if the site (inter- or intra- net) was organized better it wouldn't have to be like that. If you needed an annual report, it would be great if you could just go to the company's website and find it in two clicks, or just go right to www.somecompany.com/reports/year.html It seems that whenever I'm trying to look for something that I think is fairly straightforward on a website, I have to jump through multiple hoops to find it.

    The Common Name standard could eventually be integrated with e-mail standards to allow end users to send messages without knowing the recipient's e-mail address.
    great, mail to John Smith would go to how many people?
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  8. DHCP and WINS by Gleef · · Score: 2

    Since WINS is essentially Microsoft's name for their version of NBNS (see RFC1001 and RFC1002), it's probably covered under DHCP's NBNS option (code 44) [see section 8.5]. If that doesn't work, send bug reports to Microsoft :-)

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  9. What about dots and dashes? by schon · · Score: 2

    How about this:
    For end users, the standard means no longer having to remember or type in a series of dots, dashes and backslashes in order to find the information they need.

    Umm, is it just me, or is a "series of dots and dashes" completely meaningless?

    It sounds like the author has confused morse code and HTTP... I've never seen any url that looked like http://www.foo.com/..--.-\.-..-\..-\\-....--.-...- ./