On 8/18/11 10:42 AM, Jacob Beauregard wrote:
>
> * The labels aren't always intuitive. E.g. EduCause Affiliations, what is EduCause?

http://www.educause.edu ... "EduCause is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance
higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology."  As a group, they
define a list of Affiliations with defined meanings that we use to enable our Federated Logins
to provide services to broad classes of affiliates.  If you want a much finer grained list of
UVM specific affiliations, check out the uvmEduAffiliation attribute.

The original (and I believe still stated) purpose of the UVM Directory was to be an online
white pages.  It has replaced the UVM paper phone book that was published every year.  It also
replaced the older CSO and ph commands (well, actually, we implemented a ph command replacement
on the zoo.uvm.edu systems that performs its searches against ldap.uvm.edu).  If you don't know
what CSO and ph are, check out http://www.faqs.org/faqs/ph-faq/ .
>
> From this reasoning, I've decided I should probably query data from LDAP and present it on my
> own. However, I'm wondering what the preferred way to go about that is. Since I can't pull
> everyone at once, I'm pretty much limited to pulling by netid. If multiple query overhead is
> a concern, I could probably combine multiple netids into a single query.

Doing your own LDAP searches is probably best if you have a specific format you want to display
things in.  I do hope you are thinking about things like the security necessary to not put
people's names, addresses (physical and email), and phone numbers within easy reach of spiders
crawling the web so that they become spammer fodder.

>
> Personally, I'm leaning toward option 3, but wouldn't mind input/feedback on my thought
> process (hence my posting to the it-discuss list).

Whether you cache locally or go against ldap.uvm.edu each time you need to is going to boil
down to a performance measurement.  Which is faster - asking ldap.uvm.edu or looking in your
cache?   How you structure the LDAP search filter (you could find an attribute that is not
indexed) will affect how fast ldap.uvm.edu will respond to your search.

The servers that make up ldap.uvm.edu each process between 2 and 3 million operations per day,
and we know they are capable of at least double that load without falling over.

-- 
Frank Swasey                    | http://www.uvm.edu/~fcs
Sr Systems Administrator        | Always remember: You are UNIQUE,
University of Vermont           |    just like everyone else.
  "I am not young enough to know everything." - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)