Subject: Comments on LCUP draft - opaque cookie

From: [email-masked] (Richard V Huber)
Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 16:12:59 -0400

This may be a duplicate for some of you.  I apologize for that; the
first version ran into a spam filter on one of the mailing lists
because my mailer rewrites the sender's name in ways I wish it didn't.

This comment refers to <draft-ietf-ldup-lcup-00.txt>.

The controls defined in the LCUP draft use an opaque cookie supplied by
the server.  I'm concerned about the consequences of leaving the cookie
opaque.  It seems to me that interoperability with multiple servers
will be limited.

Section 4.6 of the draft includes the note:

   (Note that the client can synchronize with different servers during
   different synchronization sessions.)

If the cookie is opaque, this will only work if the different servers
are all running the same server implementation.  Different vendors'
implementations of LCUP will inevitably use different cookie formats
because there is no standard format.

Section 7 notes:

   By design, the protocol does not specify the format of the cookie.
   This is to allow different implementations the flexibility of storing
   any information applicable to their environment.

But that flexibility will limit interoperability.  Since multi-vendor
replicated directory environments are a goal of LDUP, shouldn't the
content of the cookie be specified in the standard?

Rick Huber