The fourth version of the UK Government OSI Profile, GOSIP, has just been published, in a different format from its previous incarnations as the Central Computer & Telecommunications Agency attempted to change the way that the profile is perceived. The new specification also fills a number of technical gaps, but leaves many of the differences with US GOSIP unresolved. The nice thing about Open Systems Interconnection standards, a wag once remarked is that there are so many to choose from – each of the seven layers contains a number of options. GOSIP specifies a subset of OSI standards which are recommended to government and public bodies to ensure interworking. In the past, however, vendors have been irritated by the way that some purchasers have blindly followed GOSIP recommendations; reading the specs and then demanding them all, whether appropriate or not. The CCTA acknowledges the problem and has consequently split GOSIP documentation into two sets – one for suppliers, with the detailed profile specifications, and the second for procurers; a more realistic view of what is available today, liberally laced with warnings that OSI procurement requires technical knowledge. There were mistakes on both sides said Stephen Harrison of the CCTA. We almost mis-sold it… and gave vendors the impression that we were de-skilling procurement. Local government seems to have been the biggest culprit – often demanding total GOSIP conformance. The UK computer and telecommunications advisory body is also altering the way in which GOSIP will be updated in the future. Don’t expect GOSIP 5 for several years, instead of re-issuing the total document in one fell swoop the organisation intends to issue discrete updates to the various modules as required – and FDDI should be one of the first. As for technical changes, and starting from the bottom up:
Network services – layers one to four: the Ethernet over twisted pair 10BaseT standard has been added, as had an interim Fibre Distributed Data Interface specification. Interim acceptance means that government can buy FDDI, but should beware the changes which may still take place in station management software. Likewise 16Mbps Token Ring is still under study. A few amendments have been made to clear up the differences with US GOSIP over Connection Oriented versus ConnectionLess networks, but, says the CCTA there is little prospect of total harmonisation in this area. Both methods have their advantages says the organisation GOSIP now includes initial specifications for local network bridges that can cope with both types of connection. The message now is that users should decide which is appropriate to the majority of their networks and stick to it. Future plans include recommendations for routing standards, metropolitan area networks and better local network bridging profiles. Network and System management was one of GOSIP 3.1’s weak points – it had only advisory notes on the emerging standards. The new version has an interim specification based closely on Common Management Interface Protocol and Common Management Information Services. Two sub-recomendations are made: a basic set of management services based upon the CMIP/CMIS core and enhanced management which requires all of the protocol’s features, except for extended services. All except very simple systems should support the enhanced specifications, the CCTA declares. FTAM File Transfer, Access and Management now has a stable spec with Iternational standards almost agreed. The number of document types supported has been substantially increased (previously only sequential text filers could be used) – a variety of optional binary document types is now added. Message handling: work is underway to include Electronic Data Interchange handling within the message handling specs, but the results are still up in the air at the moment. Previous versions of the profile included specifications based on both the 1984 and 1988 X400 standard, but with some chunks of the specifications missing; for instance UK GOSIP 3.1 did not require the christian
name to be specified in addresses – which could prove tricky if you worked in a large organisation and your name was Smith. Some of these holes are now addressed in the 1984 spec, which is now classed as stable. However GOSIP is recommending that users adopt the 1988 standard when it becomes available.
