Internet Info 1997 December/Internet_Info_CD-ROM_Walnut_Creek_December_1997.iso/drafts/draft_n_r/draft-newman-acap-imsp-lessons-02.txt

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Network Working Group                                          C. Newman
Internet Draft: Lessons Learned from IMSP                       Innosoft
Document: draft-newman-acap-imsp-lessons-02.txt                July 1997
                                                   Expires in six months


                       Lessons Learned from IMSP


Status of this memo

     This document is an Internet-Draft.  Internet-Drafts are working
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Introduction

     IMSP (Internet Message Support Protocol) [IMSP] was designed and
     implemented to supply the support functions necessary for a large
     scale IMAP4 based infrastructure with highly mobile users.
     Although the protocol was successful in its mission, it was
     realized that a slightly different approach could achieve more for
     the Internet Standards community.  Thus was born the idea for ACAP
     (Application Configuration Access Protocol) [ACAP].

     This document will discuss the successes and failures of the IMSP
     protocol and how the IMSP experiment is influencing the design of
     ACAP.


1. The origin of IMSP

     CMU (Carnegie Mellon University) has been running an experimental
     messaging system called AMS (Andrew Message System) for many years.



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     AMS has been extremely successful and has lead to a situation where
     mail, shared bboards, and newsgroups are used daily by people from
     all over the University, including non-technical departments.
     Unfortunately, AMS has two fatal flaws.  It is dependant on AFS
     (Andrew File System) which inhibits scaling and cross-platform use,
     and is not standards based so that all clients have to be developed
     in-house.

     In 1992, CMU begin working through the Internet standards process
     to bring the functionality of AMS to the standards community.  CMU
     strongly supported IMAP4 [IMAP] as the core functionality, and
     created IMSP to supply the support functions which are needed in a
     message system but are not part of basic message access.

     There are three major components of IMSP:

     1) Storage for client configuration information.

     2) Storage for user address books.

     3) Mailbox distribution/replication support.

     The first two components are successfully used today at a number of
     large sites.  Experiments with the third component are ongoing.


2. Nomadic Users

     Universities, Hospitals and other large sites need a message system
     where any PC or workstation can be used to access messages
     transparently.  As tele-commuting and laptops become more popular,
     more individuals are faced with the problem of accessing their
     messages from more than one computer and often more than one
     platform.  While IMAP4 [IMAP] allows users to access their message
     stores, it does not provide storage for address books and
     configuration information needed by these mobile users.  IMSP fills
     this niche.

     This need is so great that a significant number of sites have
     deployed IMAP4 and IMSP despite the immaturity of IMAP clients in
     1995 and the experimental nature of IMSP.  The IMAP4/IMSP
     combination allows users to move from machine to machine and get
     the same configuration and interface.


3. Client Configuration

     The CMU IMSP server implementation provides server storage of



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     client configuration and also provides administrative defaults or
     mandatory settings for client configuration.  Our experiments show
     this is a great success.

     For example, many sites wish to control what appears in the "From:"
     header of outgoing mail, while other sites let the user do as they
     choose.  The CMU IMSP server allows sites to configure either a
     default "From:" address, or a mandatory "From:" address based on
     the IMSP login name.  This prevents users from accidentally sending
     mail with the wrong "From:" address.  Administrators of large sites
     are quite fond of this feature.

     The Simeon client from ESYS corporation stores a great deal of
     private configuration information on the IMSP server, in addition
     to common configuration options.  The decision to create an IMSP
     options registry for common options as well as reserving parts of
     the name space with vendor specific prefixes appears to be sound.

     Options appear to work well as they are implemented in IMSP, and
     are certainly not limited to messaging.  ACAP should include an
     option registry with vendor specific prefixes, as well as
     administrative defaults and mandatory settings.


4. Address Books and Access Control

     Almost every messaging system provides an interface for personal
     address books which is distinct from a public directory service.
     CMU's IMSP server provides an interface to multiple personal
     address books.  It also provides rich access control on address
     books so they can be shared with other users.  As soon as a client
     interface was created for these functions they both became very
     popular.  They were so popular, in fact, that users started asking
     for the ability to "subscribe" to address books so they didn't have
     to wade though a large list.

     The basic structure for IMSP address books was that each address
     book was made up of a list of entries, and each entry was made up
     of a set of (attribute, value) pairs.  A set of basic attributes
     was defined, and others were permitted.  This structure
     successfully provided the necessary flexibility.

     Despite these successes, there are a number of problems with IMSP
     address books.  Access becomes slow when they get large, and
     searching requires two round trips to the server.  The original
     server implementation didn't allow spaces in address book entry
     names, but users soon demanded this flexibility.  There were also
     requests for access control groups to improve sharing of address



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     books.

     Finally, it became clear that there are two different models for
     address books in common use.  The Unix/text-based model has a short
     alias for each entry which expands to the email address.  The
     PC/GUI model uses common names which can be chosen from a list to
     use as the email address.  IMSP used the common name as the primary
     key for address books, which makes implementation of the
     Unix/text-based model inefficient due to the two-round trips needed
     for searching.

     The ACAP protocol should include address books with rich access
     control and a "subscription" capability.  It needs to address the
     problems we've identified in IMSP.


5. Generalization of the Application Configuration problem

     While IMSP was designed specifically for messaging applications,
     the options and address book functions could be quite useful in
     other applications.  In addition, the mobility problem is not
     limited to messaging.  Web browser bookmarks are a prime example of
     application configuration information which should be mobile.

     Another observation was that the mailbox list features of IMSP
     didn't seem to fit with the address book and configuration
     portions, and each had different target markets.  This recognition
     was the primary motivation to invent ACAP.  ACAP specifies a basic
     model which can then be applied to support different applications.


6. Large Lists

     The IMSP protocol model for address book entries and mailbox lists
     is a serious problem for large lists.  It requires fetching the
     entire list, even when a client only has display space for the
     first 50.  This can be very slow on low memory machines and over
     slow network connections.

     ACAP should provide a way for clients to implement "virtual scroll
     bars" where they only have to fetch what needs to be displayed to
     the user.  This means that ACAP needs rich server side searching
     and sorting with the ability to fetch deterministic parts of the
     resulting ordered list.







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7. The ACAP "dataset" model

     The CMU IMSP implementation ended up using the same database
     backend for all the lists (options, address book entries, address
     books, mailboxes).  The server translated the function based
     commands for each of these lists into a common set of backend
     database operations.

     ACAP can be a smaller and simpler protocol than IMSP if it provides
     data based commands rather than function based commands.  The idea
     is to take the IMSP address book model and turn it in to a generic
     container which can hold options, mailboxes, access control groups
     or even web browser bookmarks.

     Therefore the ACAP "dataset" model has the same structure as an
     IMSP address book: a dataset is a set of entries and each entry is
     a set of (attribute, value) pairs.


8. Conclusion

     IMSP was a successful experiment which demonstrates the need for a
     configuration server.  ACAP is the logical refinement of the ideas
     behind IMSP and is likely to become an important part of the
     Internet protocol suite.


9. References

     [IMSP]      Myers, J., "Internet Message Support Protocol",
                 Experiment in progress,
                 http://andrew2.andrew.cmu.edu/cyrus/rfc/imsp.html, June
                 1995

     [IMAP]      Crispin, M., "Internet Message Access Protocol -
                 Version 4rev1", RFC 2060, University of Washington,
                 December 1996.

     [ACAP]      Newman, Myers, "Application Configuration Access
                 Protocol", Work in progress, June 1997.



10. Security Considerations

     There are no known security issues in this memo.





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11. Acknowledgments

     Many thanks to Steve Hole and the ESYS corporation for their early
     client support of IMSP which was invaluable to this effort.  Thanks
     also to Terry Gray for his insistence that IMSP was too application
     specific and that something more general was needed.  And thanks to
     John Myers for his authorship of the IMSP specification and
     observation that everything could fit into the address book model.

12. Author's Address

     Chris Newman
     Innosoft International, Inc.
     1050 Lakes Drive
     West Covina, CA 91790

     Email: [e-mail]


































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