Minutes from the LDUP BOF, Washington, DC

The agenda was as follows:
10 minutes on terminology,
30 minutes on approaches,
20 minutes on charter

The intent was to define an approach on how to do LDAP replication, get a
charter to form a wg, and then go forth.

The group generally agreed that the focus of an LDUP working group should be
on directory synchronization, rather than making server A look exactly like
server B in terms of functionality, which will be impossible in an
environment where vendors are providing value-add functionality on top of
their servers.

The first two items an LDUP working group would work on would be a
requirements document and an applicability statement.  There were 4 major
work items identified as possibilities after that: One-way directory
synchronization (dir synch), 2-way dir synch, floating single-master
operations, and multi-master dir synch.

1-way dir synch is essentially the X.500 single-master, multiple slave
relationship. 2-way dir synch is where you have the SAME data mastered on
two servers and need to synchronize them. Floating single master is where
there is only a single master server for a given set of data at any one
point in time, but that server may change over time. Multi-master is
directory synchronization between n servers, of which more than two can be
writeable replicas  of the same data.

Open questions:
Do we need to solve the schema synch problem to make progress on general dir
synch?
Do we need to solve the distributed knowledge synch problem?
What about security and access control?
Do we need to standardize the mechanisms for selecting which content to
replicate?
Do we need to standardize how the directory is initially populated (as well
as reload of data)?
Do we need to cover replica compare and replica diff?

Additional items:
Cross-realm replication
Partial and fractional replication
Consistency models will be covered in the applicability statement

Items ruled out of scope were: 
Request forwarding (e.g. chaining)
Index-only replication a la the Common Indexing Protocol
Integration with TIP

There was no consensus on which order to cover the work items. Thus this
will be discussed on the list, with a draft charter to be produced by
mid-January.