jsh@usenix.org (Jeffrey S. Haemer) (10/21/89)
From: Jeffrey S. Haemer <jsh@usenix.org> An Update on UNIX* and C Standards Activities September 1989 USENIX Standards Watchdog Committee Jeffrey S. Haemer, Report Editor IEEE 1003.7: System Administration Update Steven J. McDowall <sjm@mca.mn.org> reports on the July 10-14, 1989 meeting, in San Jose, California: War and Remembrance - How I survived a Posix Meeting Listen closely to this tale of wonder and bewilderment and hope that you shall never have to face such horrors as I. Yes, I was there when, in a flurry of activity, the 1003.7 committee elected Steven Carter to the chair. To show he was a good choice, Carter immediately sat on the chair to which he'd been elected. This was swiftly followed by the election of Vice-chairs Martin Kirk and Dave Hinnant (though I shall speculate not on what vices they may have perpetrated on those chairs); Mark Colburn, Secretary (owing to a proven ability to take dictation lying on a pool-side sun bed); and their honors Bob Bauman and Shoshana O'Brien, Technical Editors. You may sense that I feel few exciting things happened in San Jose. Correct. I wish this group would get into some real fights, like other groups. Interoperability may prove our only hope. Still, progress is progress, however uncontentious. Here's what else seemed to me to be important. 1. Language Independence The group voted, nearly unanimously, that the country of Language should be independent. We were uncertain about where, precisely, it might be, but tentatively put it near Borneo. We chose to use ASN.1 ("Abstract Syntax Notation - 1") as our internal notation for data structures. The group also appointed me representative to the 1003.1 language-bindings group to watch what those pursuers of knowledge are doing in this area. __________ * UNIX is a registered trademark of AT&T in the U.S. and other countries. September 1989 Standards Update IEEE 1003.7: System Administration - 2 - 2. Interoperability X/Open continues to push this into the foreground. Luckily for us, they also continue to help us understand what it entails. Group consensus holds that interoperability is within the purview of 1003.7. What we're still uncertain of is how far down we should standardize; only through the application layer? down to the packet layer? For example, a standard application-layer protocol insuring interoperability might require that certain Application Program Interface (API) calls be available, with given arguments and results, but say nothing about how those calls are made. In contrast, a transport-level protocol might require that the information be fed into the API will be in a pseudo-ASN.1 format to help in non-homogeneous networks. A still lower level protocol might detail the exact packet structure, including ASN.1 format for the object data, to prevent foreign machines in a non-homogeneous network from throwing out otherwise unrecognizable packets. Most committee members have strong, idiosyncratic ideas about this subject and the issue is certain to re-surface in Brussels. We need input on this from the community at large. Where do YOU think a standards organization like the IEEE should draw the line in ensuring interoperability? [Editor's note -- This is not a rhetorical question. Things you do in the future may be affected by decisions P1003.7 makes in this arena. If you have an opinion on this subject, speak up.] As an aside, the current X/OPEN representative, Jim Oldroyd of the Instruction Set, Ltd., who has really helped the group a great deal in this area, may not attend the next 1003.7 meeting. We think this would be a real loss, and hope that X/OPEN and his employer find a way to arrange for him to go. 3. Misc. Some progress was made in doing the ASN.1 syntax for a few of the basic objects the committee decided on for phase I of the standard. Everyone is discovering that defining such objects (File Systems, Devices, Spools, etc.) in a non-ambiguous way using a meta-language like ASN.1 might not be as easy as we first thought. Live and learn, eh? September 1989 Standards Update IEEE 1003.7: System Administration Volume-Number: Volume 17, Number 43
jsh@usenix.org (Jeffrey S. Haemer) (01/06/90)
From: Jeffrey S. Haemer <jsh@usenix.org> An Update on UNIX* and C Standards Activities December 1989 USENIX Standards Watchdog Committee Jeffrey S. Haemer, Report Editor IEEE 1003.7: System Administration Update Steven J. McDowall <sjm@mca.mn.org> reports on the October 16-20, 1989 meeting in Brussels, Belgium: Background Joe Friday would say, "Just the facts, ma'am." And that's the way I feel. The facts are that I'm sick, it's Thanksgiving, I am going to London for two weeks tomorrow, and 1003.7 is defining a standard way to administer POSIX systems. Now, almost everyone agrees that 1003.7 should deal with networks, not just isolated systems. To wit, it would be nice if I could administer all the machines in a network from a single machine with simple commands. For example, to add a user to all machines in the domain "mn.org", all I should need to do is issue a command like "adduser -d mn.org -options -parameters username". The question is, without any de facto standard already in place to adopt, how can we achieve this? The Approach This is important, so pay attention. Because the major goal of 1003.7 is to create a standard way to manage a set of objects, the group has decided to take an object-oriented approach. Our idea is to begin by creating a list of objects to manage, then to follow that by defining the set of commands to manage each object. This approach is novel for both system administration and POSIX. It will probably require more work on the front end to define the objects, their attributes, and their relationships, than to define the actual command structure to support and manipulate them. Whether this approach will work remains to be seen. __________ * UNIX is a registered trademark of AT&T in the U.S. and other countries. December 1989 Standards Update IEEE 1003.7: System Administration - 2 - The Meeting The meeting was boring. To put it bluntly, the week was simply a work week. Objects (and sub-objects) were defined and discussed in detail, then put in the draft. Little got done on the first and last days, due to EEC formalities, which left us with three working days instead of the normal four and a half. Attendance was pretty dramatically reduced, too. About half the normal North Americans showed up, probably because of the location, and only one (yes one...) new European came even though we were meeting in Europe. Oh well, except for my having had my passport stolen, it was a good chance to see Belgium. Concerns 1. The process is taking a long time to move ahead, both because of the difficulty involved and because we seem to attract less manpower than many other groups. Moreover, since we're taking a radical approach, it takes extra time to teach the ideas to anyone new that does come. 2. System administration doesn't have the glamour of some of the other areas being standardized. As the Rodney Dangerfield of POSIX, 1003.7 gets no respect. 3. The notation we're using to define our objects is ASN.1. "Why ASN.1?" you ask. Simply because it's a standardized meta- language to describe abstract data types. The feeling was that this would help make the whole package more suitable for interoperability. I bring this up because there's some movement throughout 1003 to re-do all data structures in a new meta- language created by some of the people working on language- independence. Not only would this require that we go back and re-do our definitions, but I also think ISO will only allow the use of standardized data-languages in their standards. Does anyone out there know if there is such an ISO restriction? If so, it's important for 1003 as a whole, not just for dot seven. 4. Currently, almost all working-committee members are from vendors. IBM, DEC, HP, AT&T, and others are well-represented. A few interested parties, like OSF and /sys/admin. are there as well, but as far as I can tell, there isn't one real user. By "real user" I mean someone who does nothing but administer a system. All of us are connected somehow with creating an administrable system or getting paid to do so. Of course, I should make clear that we all have to administer systems of our own, so we're not simply an ivory tower group with no real December 1989 Standards Update IEEE 1003.7: System Administration - 3 - experience, but representation is still grossly unbalanced. 5. Finally, there's been a loss of focus on interoperability directly attributable to the loss of our X/OPEN representative, Jim Oldroyd. Jim was well respected and made many valuable contributions, but can no longer attend our meetings. As the X/OPEN representative, he was very concerned with multi-vendor environments, and was a major force in helping us focus on and ensure interoperability. I am not saying that no one else on the committee cares about the issue, but it does seem to be being pushed aside in a spirit of, "I think we shouldn't have any interoperability problems if we do this, so let's do it and worry about it later on." Jim had helped provide a more positive, direct approach of determining up front what would be needed for true interoperability. If X/OPEN is still interested in System Administration, and in making sure the 1003.7 standard includes provisions for interoperability, we could still use their help. December 1989 Standards Update IEEE 1003.7: System Administration Volume-Number: Volume 18, Number 5