Specifications

manage those products. As DMI technology evolves, installation and
management in desktops and servers will become easier.
It should be noted that the DMI specs say nothing about the transport protocol
that is used between the manageable products and the management
applications. Both of these elements of a DMI compliant system can be
implemented using any native transport protocol available in the system.
The DMI architecture includes:
•
Communicating service layer
•
Management information format (MIF)
•
Management interface (MI)
•
Component interface (CI)
1.9.1.1 Communicating Service Layer
The service layer is the desktop resident program that is responsible for all DMI
activities. Service layer communication is a permanent background task or
process that is always ready for an asynchronous request.
The service layer is an information broker, handling commands from
management applications, retrieving the requested information from the MIF
database or passing the request on to manageable products as needed via the
CI. The service layer also handles indications from manageable products and
passes that information on to the management applications.
Management applications: These are remote or local programs for changing,
interrogating, controlling, tracking and listing the elements of a desktop system
and its components.
A management application can be a local diagnostic or installation program, a
simple browser that walks through the MIF database on the local system or any
other agent which redirects information from the DMI over a network.
Manageable products: These include hardware, software or peripherals that
occupy or are attached to a desktop computer or network server, such as hard
disks, word processors, CD-ROMs, printers, motherboards, operating systems,
spreadsheets, graphics cards, sound cards, modems, etc.
Each manageable product provides information to the MIF database by means of
a file which contains the pertinent management information for that product.
Manageable products, once installed, communicate with the service layer
through the component interface. They receive management commands from
the service layer and return information about their status to the service layer.
1.9.1.2 Management Information Format (MIF)
A management information format (MIF) is a simple ASCII text file describing a
product′s manageable attributes, grouped in ways that make sense. The MIF
has a defined grammar and syntax. Each product has it own MIF file.
When a manageable product is initially installed into the system, the information
in its MIF file is added to the MIF database and is available to the service layer
and thus to management applications.
38 NetWare Integration Guide