9521074 Brett A Directory Services testbed based on the WHOIS++ protocol, is proposeed for locating people and resources on the Internet. WHOIS++ provides a highly flexible client/server environment that allows a user to search across multiple distributed databases located on multiple servers, without prior knowledge of the architecture of the database or the network location of the desired information. This project proposes to deploy a medium-scale (>450,000 entries) WHOIS++ database distributed across at least 13 servers (which contain the actual directory data base entries), and utilizing at least six centroids (data bases of indexes which point to the individual servers) in a three-level mesh (centroids which point to lower-level centroids which, in turn, point to the lowest level of centroids which point to the actual data base servers). In addition, this project proposes to develop a widely-usable access method based on clients for the World Wide Web (e.g., Netscape or Mosaic), create interface modules to allow the use of a number of different database technologies to store the WHOIS++ data, determine and implement the security and privacy issues likely to be required for use in the commercial sector, and determine whether the protocol will scale to serve the Internet at large.
