OSI Integration Area
Director(s):
o David M. Piscitello: dave@sabre.bellcore.com
o Erik Huizer: Erik.Huizer@surfnet.nl
Area Summary reported by Dave Piscitello/Bellcore and Erik
Huizer/SURFnet
The following Working Groups and/or BOFS in the OSI area met at the
Washington IETF:
FTPFTAM FTP-FTAM Gateway BOF
MHSDS MHS-DS
NOOP Network OSI Operations
OSIDS OSI Directory Services
WHOIS Shared Whois Project BOF
X400OPS X.400 Operations
THINOSI Xwindows over OSI and Skinny stack BOF
The MIME-MHS Working Group, dealing with mapping MIME into X.400(88) and
back, did not meet in Washington. The Group finished the three drafts,
and will submit them on the standards track.
FTP-FTAM Gateway BOF (FTPFTAM)
The FTP-FTAM Gateway Internet Draft was previously discussed in the now
defunct OSI-General Working Group. Josh Mindell and Robert Slaski gave
a brief presentation of the status of the work since the July 1991 IETF,
and described the changes introduced into the recently posted Internet
Draft. Much of the work introduced is not radically new, but is not
reflected in the current implementations. Steve Hardcastle-Kille
indicated that the ISODE Consortium would be willing to consider
implementation to upgrade the existing ISODE gateway if consortia
members request it (and $ up).
The Working Group discussed quite frankly, the difficulties of
sustaining interest in this project, which is locked a classic
chicken-egg situation. Absent an RFC to cite in procurement requests,
it has been difficult to foster additional implementation efforts. The
BOF requested that the OSI Area Directors inquire as to the possibility
of progressing the Internet Draft, which has been implemented, to
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Proposed Standard. It is expected that during the review and
development period following the recommendation to Proposed, at least
the two currently known implementations will be made to conform and
interoperate against the draft.
MHS-DS Working Group (MHSDS)
At its meeting in Washington, the MHSDS Working Group accomplished the
following:
o Approved an updated Charter which adds coordination of a pilot
project to the scope of the Working Group.
o Wrote a formal statement of purpose for the pilot project, and
established concrete goals, a time-frame, criteria for measuring
success, participants, and a coordinator for it.
o Reviewed four of the Group's nine documents-in-progress,
recommended two of them for advancement as proposed standards, and
made good progress on its principal routing document.
Network OSI Operations Working Group (NOOP)
NOOP talked about the revision of RFC1139 and also the Tools RFC draft
Both of these need some revision. Both need some specific text about
MUST and SHOULD, etc. The Tools RFC is going to have the MIB
information removed until there is a routing table MIB. Then the
document will be modified to point to the routing table MIB. After the
documents are revised, we will put them up as Internet Drafts and try to
move them on to Proposed Standard.
Some folks are going to work on getting a group together to make a
routing table/forwarding table MIB. (Dave Piscitello is heading this
effort).
Sue showed us the latest survey of OSI in the Internet. Some comments
were made as to changes to the format of the survey to make it easier to
fill out and understand. Sue is going to modify the survey and send it
out to the Group. The survey results are availabe on merit.edu.
The second session of NOOP was a tutorial for folks a little less
familiar with OSI and deployment issues. After the tutorial we
discussed a particular network's topology and how it might be broken up
into areas and domains.
OSI Directory Services Working Group (OSIDS)
The Working Group discussed several Internet Drafts:
o Strategic Deployment of Directory Services on the Internet. No
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comments, will be published as Informational RFC.
o DUA Metrics. No comments, will be published as Informational RFC
DSA metrics hold until tested it against an implementation.
o LDAP (Lightweight Access Protocol). This and associated syntax
document will be submitted as Proposed Standard RFCs.
The Group discussed the RFC 1373, on portable DUAs (not gone through
this Working Group) and decided that the document is confusing and
should not have been published as such.
Several drafts on representing network information and other
non-personal information in the Directory were discussed. These drafts
were deemed interesting, and the Working Group will start working on
these.
Finally the Group discussed the Charter. It was concluded that most of
the goals from the original Charter have been achieved. An inventory
was made amongst the members on whether they thought the Group should
close down, or whether there were new items in the directory area that
needed work.
The inventory showed that there is certainly interest to continue a
Directory Services group, but with a slightly shifted focus, towards
solving operational mid-term problems in the areas of datamanagement,
provision of integrated DUAs, Database coupling interfaces, security and
legal issues.
The Working Group Chair and Area Directors will draft a new Charter.
It was noted that absence of any representative of the ongoing pilots on
X.500 is very unfortunate.
X.400 Operations Working Group (X400OPS)
The Working Group started of with a new co-Chair, Tony Genovese, taking
over from Rob Hagens. Twenty-Nine participants from Eight countries
attended the meeting. The Working Group discussed various Internet
Drafts:
o Operational requirements for X.400 Management domains in the GO-MHS
Community. Minor comments; will be published as Informational RFC
and RTR.
o Using the Internet DNS to maintain RFC1327 mapping tables and X.400
routing information. This will be split into two documents.
Progressed to prototype early 1993.
o Routing coordination for X.400...... As usual lots of comments.
Routing is always a hot issue :-). Will now be advanced early 1993
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to prototype.
o Assertion of C=US; A=Internet lively discussions on this document.
Lots of opposition especially from outside of the US. A special
design team was formed on this issue Chaired by Kevin Jordan and
Allan Cargille. The US-RAC name registration and behaviour
guidelines were presented under this item.
o Mapping between X.400 and Mail-11. No more comments on the
document. Will be submitted as prototype RFC.
o X.400 use of extended character sets. No comments, will be
published as an Informational RFC.
o X.400 postmaster convention will be discussed via E-mail and then
put on standards track.
Xwindows over OSI and Skinny Stack BOF (THINOIS)
The THINOSI BOF was the second BOF on this subject, with 14
participants. The conclusions were to propose a working group with
three objectives:
1. Promote the deployment and testing of X-windows over OSI
implementations and their generalisation to be carrier of any byte-
stream over ACSE and the OSI 7-layer. (Simple byte-stream, not
equivalent to full TCP function).
2. Develop a RFC that defines the skinny bits for the generalised byte
stream carrier: The protocol that the OSI standards require, but
respecified without regard to which standard requires it.
3. Develop an RFC of skinny bits for some subset of Directory Access
Protocol.
Items 2 and especially 3 are feasibility proofs to see if such a
document can be produced and be usefull. Implementation in parallel is
anticipated.
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