Ace:Portico Meeting 1

These are the key points for the first iteration of ACE with the Portico system:

Files in the audit manager will be registered through network filesystem mounts and not through Documentum. At first, it will be assumed that the location of the files will not change and can be manually updated if done. This may become automatic later by having the AM perform a lookup in Doucmentum if its file location information is stale.

Registration will be done through a separate registration service. The Portico ingestion pipeline will insert information needed for registration into a database table. The registration service will periodically poll this table for new entries, register new files, and update the status in the database table. First version must be able to support the registration of at least 1 million files in a 20-hour day.

Registration of a file includes a desired service class which will define the audit policies for the file. Initial registrations will have a service class for each of the Portico content types.

The audit manager will have to at least be able to support a daily audit of all files which have not been audited in the past six months.

The AM and IMS will need to be able to at least support MySQL and Oracle for its persistent storage.

Additional features

Additional features to make ACE useful include:

• The AM should be able to accept as input a list of files to audit on demand which is useful for checking files after certain operations such as a RAID rebuild.
• The IMS must be able to export its information so that tokens will still be useful in the event the IMS service disappears.
• There needs to be a way to compare the file catalog in the AM with the Portico catalog to ensure completeness of file registrations.
• The AM should log all auditing activities so that each registered object has a full history of audits performed. The exact procedure for doing this is not yet defined. Additional metadata such as the version of the software and libraries used should be included.

Other issues

• The interactions required between multiple audit managers and dealing with replica copies are not yet defined.
• If archival units are placed into containers (zip files, tar files), this could make the task of the AM easier, but how should these files be registered and handle updates?
• Make sure that all parties involved understand how the witness value is used to verify the IMS. Providing a program that simply says "Yes" isn't trustworthy, but show how it can be used to to validate on your own.

-- Main.MikeMcGann - 17 Aug 2007