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