Minutes of November Meeting

[Steve Hardcastle-Kille <[e-mail]>]

                                  - 1 -



       Minutes of the 9th Meeting of the OSI-DS Working Group held at
        the 25th IETF, Washington D.C., USA on 16th November 1992
          Minutes by Srinivas R. Sataluri <[e-mail]> and
            Brien.L.Wheeler <[e-mail]>


       1.  Attendees

       Chair: Steve Hardcastle-Kille <[e-mail]>


       "Ed Albrigo"                  <[e-mail]>
       "Claudio Allocchio"           <[e-mail]>
       "Harald Alvestrand"           <[e-mail]>
       "Jules Aronson"               <[e-mail]>
       "George Chang"                <[e-mail]>
       "James Conklin"               <[e-mail]>
       "John Dale"                   <[e-mail]>
       "Letha Dugas"                 <[e-mail]>
       "William Edison"              <>
       "Daniel Fauvarque"            <[e-mail]>
       "Catherine Foulston"          <[e-mail]>
       "Ned Freed"                   <[e-mail]>
       "Peter Furniss"               <[e-mail]>
       "Ella Gardner"                <[e-mail]>
       "Tony Genovese"               <[e-mail]>
       "Arlene Getchell"             <[e-mail]>
       "Steve Hardcastle-Kille"      <[e-mail]>
       "John Hawthorne"              <[e-mail]>
       "Marco Hernandez"             <[e-mail]>
       "Tim Howes"                   <[e-mail].>
       "Erik Huizer"                 <[e-mail]>
       "Barbara Jennings"            <[e-mail]>
       "Kevin Jordan"                <[e-mail]>
       "Marko Kaittola"              <[e-mail]>
       "Mark Knopper"                <[e-mail]>
       "Mark Kosters"                <[e-mail]>
       "John Kunze"                  <[e-mail]>
       "Mary La Roche"               <[e-mail]>
       "Sylvain Langlois"            <[e-mail]>
       "Edward Levinson"             <[e-mail]>
       "John Myers"                  <[e-mail]>
       "Chris Newman"                <[e-mail]>
       "Rakesh Patel"                <[e-mail]>
       "Karen Petraska-Veum"         <[e-mail]>
       "Sheri Repucci"               <[e-mail]>
       "Jim Romaguera"               <[e-mail]>
       "Marshall Rose"               <[e-mail]>
       "Alan Roszkiewicz"            <[e-mail]>
       "Srinivas Sataluri"           <[e-mail]>
       "Richard Schmalgemeier"       <[e-mail]>











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       "Mark Smith"                  <[e-mail]>
       "Larry Snodgrass"             <[e-mail]>
       "Simon Spero"                 <[e-mail]>
       "Catherine Summers"           <[e-mail]>
       "Fumio Teraoka"               <[e-mail]>
       "Panos-Gavriil Tsigaridas"    <[e-mail]>
       "Chris Weider"                <[e-mail]>
       "Brien Wheeler"               <[e-mail]>
       "Russ Wright"                 <[e-mail]>
       "Peter Yee"                   <[e-mail]>
       "Yung-Chao Yu"                <[e-mail]>


       2.  Introduction

       The technical presentations were moved to the second half of
       the meeting. The minutes of the Boston meeting (OSI-DS-
       MINUTES 8) were accepted as written.


       3.  Review_of_Action_Items

          o Chris Weider - update on documents OSI-DS 14, 16, 17,
            19, and 20.  Chris asked that these documents be
            removed from consideration as Internet Drafts.  Chris
            has been pursuing this work under a different directory
            system and suggested that the present method of storing
            information, for instance, the NIC profiles information
            under "o=Internet@ou=NIC Profiles", is not clean.

          o Erik Huizer - progress Naming Guidelines document et.
            al. as RFCs.  Done.

          o Sri Sataluri - various people to apply DUA and DSA
            metrics and send results.  So far, three DUA metric
            evaluations have been submitted -- Xlookup, Dish, DE.
            Erik reported that the DSA metrics could not be applied
            to the Siemens DSA as it was installed only in the
            middle of November 1992.

            A discussion of the problems of interworking QUIPU and
            the other DSAs followed. Panos complained that the
            QUIPU Replication and Navigation mechanisms are non-
            standard and hence other DSAs are having trouble
            interoperating with the QUIPU infrastructure.  Sylvain
            reported that the Bull DSA is known to interoperate
            with QUIPU.  Eric and Steve reported that the latest
            release of the Siemens DSA will implement some of the
            OSI-DS RFCs, for instance, Encoding of Network
            Addresses.












                                  - 3 -



          o Thomas Johannsen, Mark Knopper and Glenn Mansfield -
            combine their work on the IP use of the directory. In
            progress.

          o Steve Hardcastle-Kille - rewrite note on DSA naming
            without using QUIPU language.  Not done.

          o Steve Hardcastle-Kille - drop OSI-DS work item.  Done.

          o Steve Hardcastle-Kille - revise charter.  Not done.

          o Steve Hardcastle-Kille and Erik Huizer - discuss schema
            management with IANA.  This discussion was held and
            IANA was comfortable about handling administrative
            functions. We may need a Schema WG for handling the
            technical issues.

          o Tim Howes - write document concerning representation of
            OID tables in the directory.  Not done.

          o Paul Barker - write DSA and DUA metrics documents as
            internet drafts.  Done.


       4.  Liason_Reports

          o WG-NAP (Erik Huizer)
            The RARE Network Applications Services (NAP) WG met in
            Pica, Italy and identified urgent issues.  The NAP WG
            resolved to work closely with the OSI-DS WG and will
            discuss the OSI-DS Internet drafts in future meetings.
            The NAP WG will conduct their technical discussions on
            the OSI-DS mailing list and the documents produced will
            be posted on the mailing list. They cataloged the
            urgent issues into three groups:

               - Data Management Issues. They plan to define the
                 procedures to manage data in DSAs by large
                 organizations and will identify tools to do the
                 same.

               - Privacy and Legal issues. They will address this
                 problem at the national level and attempt to
                 project it to the international level.

               - They propose to define requirements for management
                 of directory services -- performance, accounting,
                 configuration, fault management, OSI management
                 and links to other network and system management
                 issues.












                                  - 4 -



          o ISO/CCITT (Ella Gardner)
            Ella Gardner 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











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                 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&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.











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          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 OSI-DS WG.


       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
            Information 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.














                                  - 7 -



       6.  Progress_on_Schema_WG

       RFC 1274 has now been published for some time and a number
       of known problems and changes exist.  A small WG within
       OSI-DS 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 WG.


       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 WG members as it was
       not proposed or discussed either in OSI-DS or DISI WGs
       before publication.  Some comments were already sent to the
       author by WG 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 WGs 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











                                  - 8 -



            JPEG.

          o Character Sets (Erik Huizer) - RARE has formed a
            separate WG 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-DS_33,_OSI-DS_34)

       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-DS_35)

       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: WG 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.











                                  - 9 -



       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 OSI-DS 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 WG 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











                                  - 10 -



            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.  Univ. 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,











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            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 WG
       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 WG or are relevant to other existing WGs.


       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 (10th) OSI-DS WG meeting will be held at the 26th
       IETF at Columbus, Ohio, USA.