🚀 go-pugleaf

Marty,

In article <1990May26.190406.7788@uu.psi.com> schoff@uu.psi.com (Martin Schoffstall) writes:
>I need to argue with you on some fine points:
As you will see below, I am in complete agreement with your fine points.

>The International Standards Organization (ISO) clearly has a string
>of failures in FTAM, VT, TP0, etc...  However, there is an element of
>the tcp/ip community that thinks that X.400 and X.500 are worthy
>enough to exist as applications in the tcp/ip world.  

Count me as a part of that element. I loosely referred to
"OSI/X.400/X.500" because the previous followup had argued for the
X.400 address notation; my usage was misleading, because what I really
meant was the effort to deliver an entire interoperable OSI protocol
stack, which I agree has been a limited success at best.

>  Certain places (like Columbia University) use X.500
>as the basis for distributing their phonebook data on a timely basis
>(weekly I believe), to faculty/student/staff who participate in the
>Columbia wide network.

I am aware of the NYSERnet/PSI pilot project, and am watching it
closely. I am on the "QUIPU" mailing list [*], so you know I am
seriously interested in X.500.  I, wearing my hat as networking
coordinator for NRAO, judge that your project is still somewhat a beta
trial, and that NRAO's role is to be on the cutting edge of astronomy
research, not to be on the cutting edge of CS research, and therefore
I wait and watch.  I am impressed by what I hear of your pilot, and my
present guess is that I might recommend that we participate in a year
or so.

>It is possible that we will hide much of the ugliness of the X.400
>notation but use the protocol mechanisms to deliver multimedia mail,
>again, layered on tcp/ip.

Hear! Hear! I definitely want that elegant multimedia functionality as
soon as I can get it for our Suns, Convexes, etc., at about the same
price that I pay for the SMTP mailers and the DNS servers and
resolvers that we now use (i.e., at no extra charge).  Obviously
X.400_over_TCP/IP and X.500_lookup will coexist with good old SMTP
mail and the DNS for many years, so that we can have a graceful,
relatively painless transition to the brave new world.  I agree that
the address notation currently proposed for X.400 mailers is really
ugly compared to the DNS notation.

IMO, finishing the worldwide Internet ASAP and then carefully
transitioning it to the new application protocol suites, while
maintaining interoperability, is now the only rational strategy open
for worldwide networking. This is why I urged my fellow astronomers to
connect to the Internet ASAP so that they can "have it all" right now:
real interoperability plus the distributed DNS database plus a
realistic migration strategy to the OSI application layer components.
I judge from your remarks that you and I are in very nearly perfect
agreement on all these issues.

Best regards,
Don

Donald C. Wells, Associate Scientist | NSFnet: dwells@nrao.edu [192.33.115.2]
National Radio Astronomy Observatory | SPAN:   NRAO::DWELLS    [6654::]
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[*] Note to readers interested in the X.500 technology:
quipu@cs.ucl.ac.uk is a worldwide exploder for discussions of issues
surrounding another X.500 prototype effort called QUIPU. Send requests
to quipu-request@cs.ucl.ac.uk if you want to listen. I recommend that
only people *seriously* interested in details of X.500 technology
listen to this list. If you want to participate in the NYSERnet/PSI
pilot send a request for info to Marty (schoff@uu.psi.com). Again,
only do this if you are ready to do a lot of work (anybody who has
tried to construct and maintain an organization-wide phone directory
can tell you it is a major project). You would also want to listen to
several relevant newsgroups (e.g., comp.protocols.iso.x400 and
comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domains), and probably like me be baffled by
much of the arcane semi-gibberish ISO/OSI notations.