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OSI/FTAM Responder Manual—425199-001
2-1
2
Conformance and Interoperatility
This section presents information about the conformance to standards and the
interoperability of the Compaq FTAM responder.
Conformance is the satisfaction of the requirements of the applicable standards,
consistent with the capabilities stated in the protocol implementation conformance
statement (PICS) for the implementation. Interoperability is the ability of an
implementation of a standard to work with other implementations of the same standard
to deliver services.
A list of the supported standards and agreements that apply to Compaq FTAM is
provided in “About This Manual” at the beginning of this manual.
Conformance
To be ISO FTAM-conformant, an FTAM implementation must comply with the
International Organization for Standardization (ISO) FTAM standard for communication
between different FTAM implementations. Conformance to the ISO FTAM standard is
tested in the areas of the support of services, functional units, service classes, and file
attributes.
Conformance testing increases the probability that an implementation is able to
interwork with other implementations. Two or more implementations are more likely to
work together if they conform to the same set of standards.
The Compaq OSI/FTAM product has been tested to conform with ISO 8571, NIST
Special Publication 500-162 (Stable Implementation Agreements for Open Systems
Interconnection Protocols) Part 9—FTAM Phase 2, and US GOSIP version 1.0.
Interoperability
The interoperability, or interworking, of two FTAM implementations is the ability of
these implementations to communicate using FTAM primitives in a useful and
meaningful way. While conformance to ISO FTAM is necessary, it does not by itself
guarantee that two implementations will interwork. Even if the two implementations
conform to the same OSI protocol standard, they may be incapable of interworking with
each other for reasons outside the scope of that standard (see ISO IS 9646-1, section
5.7.2). In addition, the FTAM standard is very complex. Two implementations may
contain disjoint subsets of the standard that do not allow for interoperability but are fully
conformant to the ISO specification. For example, two systems cannot interoperate if
each supports only an initiator, or if a document type supported by an initiator is not
included among the document types supported by the responder.
The Compaq FTAM product has been tested to conform with the standards and profiles
mentioned in the above subsection, “Conformance.” It has also been tested to
interoperate with a number of other vendors according to the NISTIR 4435 document,
“FTAM Interoperability Tests,” which most vendors use as a basis for writing FTAM
interoperability tests.