OSI management] and links to other network and system management issues.
o ISO/CCITT (Ella Gardner). Ella reported on the 1992 X.500 standard, final
editing meeting held at Orlando, Florida, USA between 19th and 30th
October. Nine countries were represented and over 700 ballot comments
were discussed. Final editor's drafts are now being polished and will be
cast in stone. The text should be available by the end of 1992 which
however has to be approved by both ISO and CCITT. It is hoped that ISO
approval will be easy to obtain. CCITT approved a version of the
document last year. During the spring 1993 meeting if CCITT approves the
changes endorsed by ISO then a joint standard will be published. On the
other hand if CCITT refers the document to Study Group 7 for additional
balloting, the CCITT approval will be delayed. If such a referral takes
place, ISO may publish its own text thus opening up the possibility of
different ISO and CCITT standards.
Ella Gardner said that currently lots of users are being represented at
the standards meetings and urged more implementors to participate. Also
new standards work on Systems Management has been approved and
International and Generic Upper Layers Security are under consideration.
The next international meeting will be held in Yokohoma, Japan.
o NIST OIW X.500 SIG (Ella Gardner and John) A lot of work on ISPs was
done, and the goal is to publish something by January in the areas in
which there are editors. The ISP on strong authentication is being
edited by NIST. These ISPs will reference the 1988 version of the
standard. The issue of APDU size was discussed in the SIG, and a limit
may be placed upon how large an APDU can become.
The SIG also discussed the protocol information attribute which allows
specification of the lower layers of services, and this attribute is
now in the 1992 IS version. The SIG agreed on schema related issues but
decided not to specify anything for DUAs except that they shouldn't die!
The OIW is also discussing interoperability problems between 88 DUAs and
92 DSAs.
o DISI (Chris Weider) Chris Weider reported that the last meeting of DISI
discussed working on five documents:
- Pilot Projects Catalog has been assigned to April Marine of SRI and Tim
Howes of University of Michigan.
- Advanced Usages Catalog has been assigned to Chris Weider of Merit and
Russ Wright of Lawrence Berkeley Labs.
- Revision of RFC 1292 has been assigned to Arlene Getchell of Lawrence
Berkeley Labs., and Sri Sataluri of AT\verb+&+T Bell Labs.
- A Schema document for restaurants was considered inappropriate to the
Charter of the DISI Group and was referred to the OSI-DS Group.
- A Manual for installing X.500 QUIPU systems was considered unnecessary
as reasonable documentation is already available.
o AARN (Mark Prior - read by S.Kille)
- AARN upgraded two of their main servers to DS5000/125's with 32MB of
memory. The DSA ``cn=Bush Dog'' is housed on one of them and
``cn=Anaconda'' will migrate to the other one eventually.
- The Australian Networkshop will be held at Queensland University in
December and AARN will run a demonstration directory, together with a
few presentations on the X.500 Directory. Andrew Waugh will present a half day tutorial on setting up a Directory.
- AARN plans to provide a proxy DSA for SME's not able to run their own
DSA thus utilizing the additional capacity.
- Unisys interoperability testing (RSN) will start after a copy of the
appropriate database package used by the system is procured. The rest
of the equipment is in place.
o FOX (Tom Tignor) No formal report. DARPA funding for the FOX project has
expired, and a new proposal is still under consideration by the NSF.
o PSI WPP (Wengyik Yeong) No report.
o Paradise No report.
o NADF (Marshall Rose) The NADF formalized some agreements that relate to
their ongoing pilot. The service providers need to exchange information that will allow their directories to work together, but don't want to release any proprietary information, so a Knowledge And Naming (KAN) set
of information was developed. A protocol called CAN (based on 1992 DRP)
was developed to exchange this KAN information. It is hoped that by the
January 1993 NADF meeting, 4 or 5 service providers will be participating
in the pilot.
The standing documents of the NADF will be available on-line on the
Internet by the end of 1992.
In response to Erik's question, Marshall stated that Eurescom has a
project to establish a European Directory Forum (EDF). A bootstrap
meeting will probably be held in March 1993.
Action Items: The Area Director Eric Huizer should write a note to the
FOX, PSI White Pages and Paradise personnel and request regular reports
to the OSIDS Working Group.
5. Progression of Documents to RFC Standard
o String Representation of Distinguished Names as a Proposed Standard. The
IESG had couple of comments. Also, Steve Kent suggested three items that
need to change. The Group agreed that the ``Alternative Approach''
section will have to be dropped.
Action Item: Steve will make the necessary changes.
o User Friendly Naming as an Informational RFC. The UFN document could have
been published as an Informational RFC, but was delayed to be co-published
with the String Representation of Distinguished Names document, which had
to go through the IESG.
o Naming Guidelines as an Informational RFC.
o Lightweight Directory Access Protocol.
Action Item: Eric will progress this document shortly.
o The String Representation of Standard Attribute Syntaxes
Action Item: Eric will progress this document shortly.
6. Progression Schema Working Group .
RFC 1274 has now been published for some time and a number of known
problems and changes exist. A small working group within OSIDS was to be
established to handle this work, but no one has had the resources to pursue
this as of yet. The discussion with IANA reflected that IANA would be
happy to handle the administrative process, but the associated technical
issues are beyond them. There seem to be two possibilities for maintaining
a schema document, the NREN NIC can manage it or if funded, the FOX project
can manage it.
Action Item: Look for volunteers to form the Schema Working Group.
7. Strategy Document (Erik Huizer)
Only very minor comments were received, so Erik wishes to publish this
document as an Informational RFC. Steve was disturbed by the apparent lack
of comments, but Erik believes more comments will arise when the document is
published, especially by co-authors.
Action Item: Erik should publish this document as an Informational RFC.
8. Portable DUAs (RFC 1373)
This document came as a surprise to the Working Group members as it was not
proposed or discussed either in OSIDS or DISI Working Groups before
publication. Some comments were already sent to the author by Working Group
members. Steve is concerned that this document is not beneficial to
people's impressions of X.500. It gives a brief overview of several DUAs,
and instructions for installing them. What is the purpose of this type of
RFC? However, anyone has the right to publish an Informational RFC.
Action Item: Eric to discuss with Jon Postel that in future such documents
be referred to relevant working groups before publication.
9. Progress of Experiments
o QOS (Erik Huizer) - No progress yet but progress is expected after the
New Year.
o JPEG (Russ Wright) - The concept of JPEG has been proven and all that
remains to be done is the publication of the schema. This experiment is
therefore successful and concluded.
Action Item: Russ Wright to publish the schema for JPEG.
o Character Sets (Erik Huizer) - RARE has formed a separate working group
for character set issues and is currently writing a couple of papers, but
nothing is ready yet.
o DIT Counting (Steve Hardcastle-Kille) - Syntax handlers have been written
for QUIPU, but no operational deployment has yet been seen.
10. DSA and DUA Metrics (OSI-DS33, OSI-DS34)
The DSA document is waiting for input on various implementations, while the
DUA document has been completed for three DUAs (Xlookup, Dish, DE).
Action Items: Paul should publish OSI-DS 33 as an Informational RFC, while
OSI-DS 34 should be held as an Internet-Draft until it has been applied to
at least two DSAs. Sri should compile the current DUA metrics information
into an Internet-Draft.
11. Restaurant Schema (OSI-DS35)
This document was not formally presented but members gave several comments.
It may be worth-while to refer to something like the Michelin Guide to
determine if any useful information has been left out or can be represented
in a better way. Also, are the new tourist objects at level 0 really
necessary? There was concern about the legality of including comments
(especially negative) about restaurants in the directory. Further
discussion of the schema was differed.
Action Item: Working Group members should forward any comments to the
author of the paper.
12. Representing IP information in the DIT
Mark Knopper gave an overview of the paper ``Charting IP Networks in the
Directory''. The paper includes,
o A framework for representing network infrastructure information in X.500,
o An IP-specific network image,
o Support for the Soft Pages Project and use of the Directory to support
applications such as best-cost network path for document retrieval.
The essential task is to build a network map within the directory. This
means disseminating information about connectivity, properties of paths,
points-of-contact for network elements, etc.
The services that can be offered on top of this network map include
configuration management, routing management, fault management, service
management, optimization, name and address mapping, autonomous systems,
and network administration.
A companion document, ``Representing IP Networks in the X.500
Directory,'' defines objects that are specific to creating the network
map referred to above. Mark stated four specific goals of this work:
o Map from network number to network, host, owner, etc.
o Support delegation of IP address blocks.
o Support classless IP networks.
o Support differing views of the network.
A third document named ``Representing File Information in the Directory''
details how to represent the resources available on anonymous ftp servers.
Action Items: The ``Charting...'' document should become an
Informational RFC that is related to the Informational RFC ``Strategic
Plan...''. The ``Representing IP...'' and the ``Representing File...''
documents should become Experimental RFCs.
13. Revision of Charter
The OSIDS Charter needs revision, as much of the stated purpose has been
fulfilled. It needs to be updated to express the current interests of the
Group. To help revise the Charter, on Erik's suggestion, a survey of the
interests of the members in the room was taken. Here is a list, without
attribution, of items mentioned as important.
o The Working Group should only discuss the use of X.500 for and on the
Internet and related issues, such as representation of network
information within X.500, light-weight protocols, etc.
o There is still a real need for coordination of X.500 pilots, to serve as
a forum for solving operational problems and propagating the solutions
throughout all the pilot activities.
o X.500 needs to achieve critical mass, and that the Group has defined many
very useful capabilities within X.500, but people need to use them.
o To achieve critical mass it is necessary to make X.500 easier to install
and less resource-intensive.
o Defining a MIB for managing the Directory is very important.
o Operational certificate management using X.500 is important to
organizations such as the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the U.S.
Post Office.
o Electronic directories should serve more purposes than just white pages.
o Security is a critical issue to be resolved before operational
deployment. The University of Michigan is using Kerberos with X.500.
o Need to put more energy into pilots.
o Interfacing DBMS with X.500.
o The pilot in USA should become active again and must be managed
pro-actively. For the service to be useful the data in the directory
must be accurate and there needs to be a user agent on each desk-top
computer.
o Rutgers University successfully implemented DNS in X.500 and is using
kerberos for authentication.
o Gateway issues are important. Standard APIs for popular systems like
X.500, WAIS, and Gopher need to be defined.
o Clean up X.400 use of directory. Mechanism for registering attributes and
object classes and hence schema management.
o SurfNet's 1993 transition plans to operational X.500 have the following
priorities: user agents for all possible platforms, concentration on
white pages services, privacy of information, and data management. With
regard to privacy, it was stated that Dutch privacy law restricts
directory information to items such as facsimile telephone number,
telephone number, postal address, and email address. Even voluntary
publication of information by individual users is illegal. In fact, if
someone puts inappropriate information into a supported attribute, then
the provider is liable. This will probably lead to users not being able
to modify their own entries. The Dutch law further prevents export of
information to countries that do not have decent privacy laws. This may
prohibit internetworking with Japan and the U.S., among other countries.
In summary, Steve stated that at this juncture, investigation of some of
the operational issues of X.500 is going to be critical to its acceptance.
There is already work going on to deal with some of the concerns that were
expressed (OSISEC, SECUDE, etc.). Steve feels that X.509 has many issues
associated with it, and that a separate Working Group should be set up to
deal with these issues.
Action Item: Steve and Erik will draft the revised Charter and circulate
the document for comments on the mailing list. This document will describe
all the concerns that have been put forth, while noting that some of these
may either deserve a new working group or are relevant to other existing
working groups.
14. AOB
Harald inquired about internationalization of the directory. It was
determined that no action on this would be taken at this time.
15. Next Meeting
The next OSIDS Working Group meeting will be held at the 26th IETF in
