Directory Services at Texas Instruments

1
Directory Services at Texas Instruments

• Jim May
• Senior Member Technical Staff
• jmay_at_ti.com

2

How many directories do you have?

• Human resources
• Contractor information
• Lotus Notes
• MS Exchange
• Telephone numbers
• Distributed Security

• MS Mail
• ccMail
• SAP
• Help desk/problem tracking
• SMTP/POP3 readers
• Relational DBs or flat files

3
From PH to X.500/LDAP

• Early 90 3 installations of QI/PH
• Central distribution of QI data
• 1995 first prototype directory loaded
• 1996 first pilot DSA (1988) loaded
• 1997 March - replaced 1988 with 1993 version.
  Single master/two user servers
• 1997 Assigned DS aliases for site directories

4
Current status of DS Servers

• 1 Master directory server located in Plano
• 20 Consumer/Users servers with locations
  worldwide
• 78,000 people entries in the directory
• Data sources - Employees, contractors, mainframe
  legacy mail system, others
• Main users - SMTP mail infrastructure, phone
  number lookup.

5

DS input feed processing
Processing is done via Perl script that is
scheduled with cron
HR data XID data MSG data SSi Data Andersen
Data
Odsdump
dbm database
db.ready db.update
Ldap updates adds modify delete
Files are made available for customer use via
anonymous FTP
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Sources of DS data
Human Resources Security
User
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DS Usage
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Suggestions for Deployment

• Make it easy for them to get to the directory
• Use standard attribute names for commonly used
  attributes
• Provide programming help/examples
• Keep data current
• Get a killer application
• email
• company photos
• phone book

9
Whats left to do

• Metadirectory
• Continue web interface enhancements
• Continue DSA fanout
• Reduce use of output DS feed files
• Help users develop their applications

10
Questions?

• Jim May
• jmay_at_ti.com