Enough introduction – what is the point I want to make?
Alan writes: “Similar to how you need a Passport when travelling between two countries, two Domains need to be “cross-certified” in other to trust each other.”
That statement isn’t correct. Domains in Domino is, strictly speaking, a way to plan and manage mail routing. Nothing else. There is an one-to-one relationship between a Domino domain and a Domino Directory, that is a Domino Directory holds all the servers and users in the domain. Servers and users from different domains may belong to the same organization(s) and/or organizational units.
I agree there is a certain security aspect in play when deciding whether to divide your Domino infrastructure into domains but the main issue has to do with mail routing. Another has to do with deviding responsibility for managing different parts of the installation to regional IT-departments.
Cross-certification on the other hand is a cryptology term and is used for establishing trust between organizations, servers and users that does not share a common certificate. It does therefore not make sense to speak of cross-certification for Domino domains since a domain isn’t a cryptology “thing”. It is like comparing apples and oranges.
That’s all… 🙂
If you think I am wrong please let me know.
Yes, technically your are correct. You have to understand the intended audience for my blog is the average user, not an admin. I did not want to get into the actual details, I just wanted to give them a general idea about the boundaries created by a domain. Notice I did not get into things like Notes Named Networks, as I thought that would be too detailed for my readers. Sorry if I caused you any confusion.
Back in the earliest days that I worked with Notes, I came up with the following set of simple definitions:
Common Name == what am I called?
Distinguished Name (Org + Org Units) == who am I, really? Also, who says I am me?
Domain == where do you find me?
Home server == where do I find my mail?
Notes Named Network == what can I see?