🚀 go-pugleaf

jinho@iti.gov.sg (Tan Jin Ho) writes:

>Hi,
>        I am new to the X.400 world. I found out the other day
>that an X.400 (mnemonic) address conists of country, ADMD, PRMD,
>organization, organizational unit, surname, given name, initials, 
>and generational qualifier. If this is true, then I am afraid, 
>the X.400 address is not unique. 
>This is especially true in a Chinese community where
>(1) some surnames are prevalent (e.g. Lim, Lee, Tan);
>(2) there are a few very popular given names (e.g. Guo Hua, Jian Hua, ...)
>(3) generational qualifiers are rare (never see one before)
>(4) no middle name
>How does people handle the uniqueness of X.400 address in this environment
> ? I can think of a simple solution but would like to hear from the net
>(since I'm just starting to look at mail systems).

>I was thinking of adding numbers to the name (e.g.
>TAN Guo Hua 1, TAN Guo Hua 2, LEE Guo Hua 1, LEE Guo Hua 2). 
>Where is the best place to put the numbers '1' and '2' ?
>The originator uses the name say "Tan Guo Hua" and the user agent (after 
>consulting the directory service) will pop up a list of recipients 
>(with additional attributes) for the originator to select.

>Does this sound like a reasonable solution ? How do people solve
>this problem (I assume somebody else ran into this 
>restriction before). The same thing happens to X.500 names too
>right ?

>While we are at it, has someone done any work on bringing X.400
>address to the residential environment (street address, locality, ...)
>? The Red Book mentioned a little about this, but is there any 
>implementation that does this ?

>Regards,
>Jin-Ho
>jinho@iti.gov.sg
>^^^^^
>I have 'uncommon' name 8^P

Not sure how the Chinese world is catered for, but X.400 (at least in the days
long ago when I worked on 84 version) is very ASCII orientated - I remember
the first customer for a product I was involved with was in Norway, where they
use extended characters - and guess what - these were (are?) not legal in
X.400 ORNames!

Guess countries that use characters other than the standard US/UK ones need
to contribute more to ISO and CCITT?????

Hopefully the situation is better now - is it???
-- 
Dave Torr                                   dave@philips.oz.au
Software Development Manager                Tel +61 3 881 3587
Philips Public Telecommunications Systems   Fax +61 3 883 3577
Views expressed are personal and do not necessarily reflect Philips' policy.

There are 2 solutions in the X.400/88 standard to the character set problem
in O/R names.

1) Allow TeletexStrings in O/R name attributes
   TeletexStrings allow ISO-IR-87, which is a Japanese character set.
   (they probably had a man on the comittee...Greek and Arabic are still out)
2) Allow Directory Names instead of O/R names to be used in submission.
   This allows looking up the "real" name from X.500.

(why standardize one solution when you can standardize two :-)

In both cases, you can see the hand of ADMDs trying to protect their
previous investment: whenever an O/R name is passed across an international
boundary, it is supposed to have all attributes represented in Printable
(that is, USASCII without some characters) IN ADDITION TO other forms.

People are thinking now that an address should be for machines, not people.
I would not like to have to consider Chinese (or Norwegian) characters
for my routing tables, even though my son's name cannot be written in ASCII.

As for uniqueness, this is a local matter. 
Often, use of OUs will be sufficient.

But I know of an organization where two people with the same name worked in
the same OU; one of them got an arbitary middle initial.

-- 
                   Harald Tveit Alvestrand
Harald.Alvestrand@delab.sintef.no
C=no;PRMD=uninett;O=sintef;OU=delab;S=alvestrand;G=harald
+47 7 59 70 94