| In some ways, Plug and Play overlaps another industry
initiative that promises to make PCs easier to maintain:
DMI (Desktop Management Interface). DMI is a new standard
proposed by the Desktop Management Task Force (Hillsboro,
OR), an industry group that counts DEC, Hewlett-Packard,
IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Novell, SunConnect, and SynOptics
among its charter members. Finalized in April, DMI is a standard mechanism for managing PCs, servers, peripherals, and applications from the network level to the desktop. It should be particularly useful for network administrators who use desktop management tools to maintain and troubleshoot LANs. It supports existing standards like SNMP as well as PnP. "DMI is a superset of PnP," says Shannon Gray-Voigt, who is the industry standards marketing manager for Intel and a member of the DMTF. "Both technologies have the same goal. PnP is really a step toward DMI." DMI adds a layer of system software that provides configuration information and other services to higher-level applications. It stores the information on the computer's hard disk in a series of small files called MIF (Management Information Format) files. Ideally, every hardware and software component on the system would have its own MIF file describing various attributes of the component, including the system resources it needs. Diagnostic tools can query the MIF files to help users and administrators solve problems. On a PnP system, the DMI layer can talk directly to the PnP Configuration Manager to retrieve information about the machine. This communication is vital, because a PnP system can reconfigure itself on the fly. A network management tool might get confused if a PC's network card swapped resources with another device and suddenly appeared to drop off the LAN. The DMTF's goal is to put DMI services on all major operating systems, including MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, OS/2, Chicago, and NetWare. Apple is involved, too, so DMI could become a broad-based standard for managing heterogeneous networks. Copyright 1994-1998 BYTE |