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RFC 1279 X.500 and Domains November 1991

1 The Domain Name System

The Domain (Nameserver) System (DNS) provides a hierarchical resource labelling system [Moc87a] [Moc87b] [Lar83]. Example domains are:

MIT.EDU
VENERA.ISI.EDU
CS.UCL.AC.UK

Entries usually have a single name, although pointers to entries (not subtrees) may be provided by CNAME records. Information (resource records) is associated with each entry. Name components are typically chosen to be shortish (e.g., CS").

RFC 822 mailbox names are closely related [Cro82]. For example:

<S.Kille@CS.UCL.AC.UK>

The local-part of the RFC 822 mailbox can be considered as one level lower in the domain hierarchy.

2 X.500

The OSI Directory, usually known as X.500, provides a very general naming framework [CCI88]. A basic usage of X.500 is to provide Organisationally Structured Names. A Schema for this is defined within the standard. Name components will typically have longish values. This is an example directory name represented in Tabular form:

Country GB
Organisation University College London
Organisational Unit Computer Science
Common Name Stephen E. Hardcastle-Kille

This can also be written in the User Friendly Name" notation defined in [HK91]. This syntax is used for names in the rest of this document:

Stephen E. Hardcastle-Kille, Computer Science,
University College London, GB

This type of structure is termed organisational X.500". This is a subset of the general capabilities.

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