File Transfer and Access Management

Whenever we work in a number of individual systems which are connected together by a network we face a challenge. Each system has its own file store which may be different from the file stores of other participating systems like different file store structure and different file formats. The ISO 8571 series of standards for File Transfer, Access, and Management (FTAM) provide useful services for addressing this problem. FTAM provides file service uniformity by having each Real file store Represented by a Virtual file store. The latter serves as a generic model for the former. Although the real file stores are system dependent and potentially different, the virtual file stores all adhere to the same format and protocol. FTAM furnishes the specification for virtual file stores. The mapping between a virtual file store and its corresponding real file store is beyond the scope of FTAM; it is the responsibility of the system which owns the real file store. FTAM provides the necessary services for applications to establish associations with remote file system to: transfer files, access and manipulate file contents (read and write records), manage files (create, delete, copy, move, etc.), and manipulate file attributes (name, access permissions, dates, etc.). FTAM provides an association between an initiator and a responder which make the FTAM services accessible to the local and remote systems. For its virtual file stores, FTAM uses a model which resembles the UNIX file system model. It views the whole file system as a treelike hierarchical structure, where the tree nodes represent directories and the leaves represent actual files or references (similar to symbolic links in UNIX) to other nodes. Each of these is represented by an FTAM object (i.e., file object, directory object, and reference object).A file itself consists of attributes and contents. The file attributes denote its various properties, such as name, creation date, and size. FTAM classifies attributes into four groups; these are summarized in Figure 8.89. The file contents are comprised of a set of named Data Units (DUs). DUs are combined in a hierarchical manner to build larger structures called File Access Data Units (FADUs). Error! Bookmark not defined. Shows this for a simple file structure consisting of four DUs organized as five FADUs.

FTAM services are also organized into related groups so that their selection can be negotiated when an association is being established. This grouping is done at two levels. The first level organizes the services into functional units (Similar to functional units for earlier OSI layers). The second level organizes the functional units into service classes. FTAM defines five service classes: File transfer class This class supports association management and the transfer of files between an application and a remote file system. File management class This class supports association management and the remote management of files (e.g., creation, deletion, attribute manipulation) from an application. File access class This class supports association management and the remote manipulation of file contents from an application. File transfer and management The class is the combination of services from the first two classes. Unrestricted class This class support user-selected functional units in an arbitrary fashion. The ISO 8571 series of standards which describe all aspects of FTAM consist of a number of parts, four of which were touched upon in this section's

ISO 8571 .1FTAM General Introduction ISO 8571 .2FTAM Virtual Filestore ISO 8571 .3FTAM File Service Definition