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Glossary of terms

Glossary of terms


Attribute
The building block of the Management Information Format (MIF); describes a single characteristic of a manageable product or component. A set of related attributes constitutes a group.

Class string
A text string that identifies a group outside the context of a particular component declaration. Identical group definitions will have identical class strings.

CMIP
Common Management Information Protocol, an OSI-based network management protocol standardized by ISO.

Command block
This term relates to the data block Management Interface documented in the DMI 1.1 Specification.


NOTE: The interfaces and structures defined by the DMI 1.1 specification are not supported on UnixWare.


Component
Any hardware, software or firmware element contained in (or primarily attached to) a system.

Component instrumentation
A descriptive code or an ASCII file that defines manageability data about components.

Instrumentation can cover everything from the computer's temperature to configuration data to what versions of software are installed. The data is specified in a standard format (see Management Information Format).


Component Interface (CI)
The Component Interface (CI) is an API that handles communication between manageable elements and the DMI's Service Layer.

Direct interface
The method by which a component instrumentation informs the Service Provider that the instrumentation is already running. Rather than starting the code to service incoming requests, the Service Provider directs the requests to the code already running.

DMI
The industry's first set of OS-independent and protocol-independent application programming interfaces (APIs) for managing PCs, servers and other computer equipment. Developed by the Desktop Management Task Force (DMTF), DMI provides manageability through three layers of software: Service Provider, Management Interface, and Component Interface.

DMI2SNMP
The DMI to SNMP mapper

DMTF
Desktop Management Task Force. An industry consortium of more than 120 vendors, established in 1992 and committed to making PCs and servers easier to understand, use, configure and manage. SCO is a DMTF member and influences future directions and developments. The DMTF developed the Desktop Management Interface and it sponsors working groups that standardize manageability requirements for different classes of computer products.

Event
A runtime condition or change of state within a system.

Event Consumer
A software entity that has registered with the Service Provider through the Management Interface with a non-null indication callback procedure address, that is, it has registered to receive events.

Event Generator
A hardware or software device that has undergone a change in state or in which a certain condition of interest has occurred. This change of state or event directly or indirectly causes a new event to be processed by the Service Provider.

Event Reporter
The software entity that causes a new DMI event to be processed by the Service Provider.

Group
A collection of attributes. A group with multiple instances (rows) is called a table.

Indication
An unsolicited report resulting from an event, either from a component instrumentation to the Service Provider, or from the Service Provider to a Management Application.

ISO 8859-1
A character encoding standard defined by the International Standards Organization (ISO). Commonly known as extended ASCII or 8-bit ASCII.

Key
An identifier of a particular instance (row) of a table.

Keylist
A list of attribute IDs that is used as the index into a table.

Localized string
A version of a display string that is a translation of the original string into an equivalent string in the appropriate local language.

Management Information Base
See MIB.

Management Information Format
See MIF.

Management application (MA)
Code that uses the MI to request management activity from components.

MIB
Management Information Base (SNMP's equivalent of a MIF)

Management Interface (MI)
The Management Interface (MI) is an API that provides the interface between the Service Layer and management applications and allows these applications to access, manage and control systems, components and peripherals. The MI offers a consistent interface for any management application to the various mechanisms used to obtain information from products and components within a system. It also enables management applications to access information from any system or product regardless of vendor.

MIF
Management Information Format. An ASCII text file that describes a product's manageable features and attributes. DMI maintains this information in a MIF database.

MIF database
The collection of MIF files, stored by the Service Provider (in an implementation-specific format).

MIF file
A file that uses the MIF to describe a component.

OID
Object Identifier (SNMP identifies every object by a unique OID )

ONC
Open Network Computing. In the context of this document, ONC refers to the type of Remote Procedure Call (RPC) interfaces in use.

Octet
An 8-bit quantity.

Request
A function call issued from the Management Application to accomplish a specific task.

Response
The data and status returned from a request.

Row
An instance in a table.

Service Provider (SP)
The Service Provider (SP) is a program that resides in the desktop system or server, and is responsible for all DMI activities. This layer collects management information from products (whether system hardware, peripherals or software), stores that information in the DMI's database and passes it to management applications as requested.

SNMP
Simple Network Management Protocol. A widely used protocol for communicating management information between the managed elements of a network and a network manager. SNMP focuses primarily on the network backbone; it is complemented by standards such as the DMI, which extend network manageability to the PC.

Table
A multidimensional group; a group with more than one instance (row).

Unicode
A character-encoding standard. Unicode characters are two octets each. When the first octet is zero, the second octet maps to the characters in ISO 8859-1. Unicode is not supported by the DMI implementation on UnixWare 7.

© 2004 The SCO Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
UnixWare 7 Release 7.1.4 - 27 April 2004