Remote Account Maintenance Protocol BOF (RAMP)

Reported by Gina Blaber/O'Reilly and Associates

David Crocker, the Services Applications Area Director was present.

This BOF was tasked with discussing interest in developing a protocol to
enable quick, automatic setup of application-layer software on servers
and clients.  Spry, Inc.  and O'Reilly and Associates presented an
existing protocol which accomplishes this.  The current implementation
is an authenticated connection-oriented protocol in which the client
populates a server-based template with client information, which causes
the server to create an account and return configuration information to
the client.  In this implementation, the client uses the return
information to, in turn, configure local client applications including
e-mail, netnews and PPP dialer software.

After introductions by Tim O'Reilly, the group heard a presentation from
Jeffrey Payne who has developed the current RAMP draft specification and
working clients and servers.  Two key functional objectives of the
Spry/O'Reilly model are a simple client implementation and the ability
to work with proxy devices.

Some concern about possible duplication of effort by the DHC Working
Group was presented.  It was argued that DHCP is designed for the
dynamic configuration of client TCP/IP stacks, but not for client or
server application configuration.

Multiple language support and security issues were also points of
discussion, with concerns expressed by a representative of CERT
regarding the anonymous nature of some transaction types.  The current
model uses a (validated) credit card number to create a commercial
Internet access account.

Questions regarding the extensibility of the template-based design were
addressed by correlating the templates with SNMP MIBs, which too must be
custom designed for each device type.

Dave Crocker and Mike O'Dell felt that this protocol addressed a real
problem for plug-and-play functionality.  Both felt it was necessary to
continue to clarify the problems addressed by this protocol.

Because no e-mail discussion preceded the BOF, Dave Crocker thought
e-mail discussion was in order prior to the formation of a working
group.

Three major tasks were suggested:


  1. A statement of the problem domain.

  2. Development of a list of concrete problems that could be solved by
     the RAMP approach.  Candidates for exploration included:

       o New network access and server registration and client
         configuration;

       o E-mail registration and configuration;

       o ``Netnews'' service registration and selection of news groups;

       o Fax and printing registration and configuration;

       o MBone registration and configuration;

       o File service registration and configuration;

       o Software distribution and update; and

       o Commercial database registration.


  3. Due diligence.  Further exploration of whether existing approaches
     like DHCP (for network configuration) or HTML forms (for
     application layer services) could address those problems.  EDI
     (X.12) was also suggested, but as Mike O'Dell remarked, RAMP is to
     X.12 as MIME is to X.400, and is probably overkill for the jobs at
     hand.


Jeff agreed to post the current draft of the RAMP specification to the
list.

The draft RAMP documentation has been placed in
ftp.interserv.net:/docs/RAMP/.  A listserver has been set up under the
name RAMP at listproc@interserv.net.


Attendees

Steve Alexander          stevea@lachman.com
J. Allard                jallard@microsoft.com
Kevin Altis              altis@ibeam.intel.com
Steven Baker             msbaker@cs.uoregon.edu
Luc Boulianne            lucb@bunyip.com
Stephen Bowman           srb@nwnet.net
Gregg Brekke             gbrekke@mr.net
Chris Caputo             ccaputo@microsoft.com
David Crocker            dcrocker@mordor.stanford.edu
Shane Davis              shane@delphi.com
Ian Duncan               id@cc.mcgill.ca
Urs Eppenberger          eppenberger@switch.ch
Terry Gray               gray@cac.washington.edu
Sally Hambridge          sallyh@ludwig.intel.com
Bent Jensen              bent@cisco.com
Scott Kaplan             scott@wco.ftp.com
Edwin King               eek@atc.boeing.com
Ted Kuo                  tik@vnet.ibm.com
Mitra                    mitra@pandora.sf.ca.us
Andy Nicholson           andyni@microsoft.com
Michael O'Dell           mo@uunet.uu.net
Tim O'Reilly             tim@ora.com
Jeffery Payne            jpayne@interserv.net
Dan Peterson             pete@interserv.net
Karen Petraska-Veum      karen.veum@gsfc.nasa.gov
George Phillips          phillips@cs.ubc.ca
Robert Reschly           reschly@brl.mil
Marshall T. Rose         mrose.iesg@dbc.mtview.ca.us
Aleks Totic              atotic@ncsa.uiuc.edu
Phil Trubey              ptrubey@netcom.com
John Veizades            veizades@wco.ftp.com
Mark Vickers             mvickers@fhcrc.org