Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!linac!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!jarthur!ucivax!gateway
From: pv@eng.sun.COM (Peter Vanderbilt)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.iso.x400
Subject: Re: Is X.400 good for international mail?
Message-ID: <9101081841.AA04675@polya.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 8 Jan 91 18:51:34 GMT
Lines: 43
Approved: usenet@ICS.UCI.EDU

>  First of all, most of the owners have never *heard* of Object Identifiers
>  and could care less, so it's going to be a long time if we wait for them.
>  Our customers need the identifers *now*.  So we're just going to have to
>  do it ourselves somehow.

Unfortunately, you may be right.  It doesn't really matter where an OID
(object identifier) comes from as long as it's well defined.  However,
I am concerned about lack of communication about particular OID
definitions.  If you send a Lotus spreadsheet to me, I want you to be
using an OID that my system knows about.

Perhaps announcing your OID definition on this list may be enough.

Better would be some kind of living document available on the net that
was a repository for body part definitions.  Anybody have any ideas on
how to make this happen?  Conceivably X.500 could be used to map OIDs
to human readable descriptions.

>  BTW, I don't think it's necessary to define the
>  objects in ASN.1, I forget the phrase (I haven't been dealing with the X.400
>  side of things that much) but I believe there's some way of saying that
>  it's simply an object known at both ends and unspecified in the middle.

Right, just specify that the data is octet-aligned (but not ASN.1
BER).  You do need to specify the format of the data (defining such
things as as the byte ordering of ints (if any) and whether lines are
terminated by CRLF, LF or either (I recommend the last)).

>  Who do you go to in the US to get that [root]
>  identifier?

Call Beth Somerville at ANSI ((212) 642-4976) for an application.
The fee is $1000.

>  But I thought that wasn't a problem for
>  headers, just body parts?  My understanding was that headers have a limited
>  character set (otherwise known as "screw the foreigners").

Not really.  The subject field has used an international char set
(T.61) since 1984 (although I've never seen it used for anything other
than ASCII) and 1988 X.400 introduced T.61 components into addresses.

Pete