Re: How unique must Distinguished Names be?

Andrew.Findlay@brunel.ac.uk
Thu, 1 Aug 1996 16:19:58 +0100 (BST)

>I am proceeding on the assumption that I must disambiguate the DN by
>introducing extra attributes, e.g:
>
>dn: uid=<unique code>, cn=J Soap, o=BT plc, c=gb

Absolutely right. The whole point of Distinguished Names is that they
can be used to distinguish one entry from another with no ambiguity.

>The trouble is that this makes DNs ugly and I hate it, is there a better
>way?

The only alternative is to add levels of hierachy so that clashes are
less likely in each department. There is still no guarantee that all
names in a department will be unique, so some organisations have taken
the approach of *always* adding a unique ID code to the DN.

Perhaps your efforts should be directed to getting user interface
builders to display such multi-valued DNs in an acceptable form :-)

Doesn't BT have an X.500 directory already?

Andrew

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