Re: Charter items

[RJ Atkinson <rja@extremenetworks.com>]

On Friday, Mar 28, 2003, at 10:35 America/Montreal, Ron Bonica wrote:
> It seems that
> three more work items are before us. These are:
>
> 1) adopt or create a structure of management information (as did RFC 
> 1155)
> 2) codify some very basic management information (as did RFC 1213)
> 3) define a security model and invite security experts to crawl all 
> over it
>
> Comments?
I think that (1) and (2) are premature at this time.  Lets sort out the
protocol mechanism for moving blocks of config gorp around first, see if
that turns out to be usable by operators, then take on more work once 
we've
got some actual experience with that.

As to (3), my previous note was trying to suggest that we at least try
to get someone from the Security Directorate assigned to provide 
(informal
for now) early guidance on security matters.  I'd guess that if mrw or
someone were to ask smb or rhousley, they'd be happy to try to identify
someone to help (informally for now; formally iff a WG were formed in 
future).

IETF WGs often have real problems with "mission creep" and consequent 
lack
of focus.  Lets please not repeat that common error here.  Instead, 
lets work
on one thing at a time, in a reasonable sequence, rather than trying to 
design
the panacea protocol all at once.

If we could just replace screen-scraping (Tcl/Expect) with the Enns' 
draft
approach, that would be a big leap forward for a lot of 
end-users/operators.
After that is sorted out, then moving on to additional stuff (which 
stuff
being TBD until then) might be eminently sensible.

[And I'd still prefer to publish the Enns' I-D right away as 
Experimental RFC,
so there is a stable spec for folks to experiment with, proceeding with 
any
standardisation work only after that is out as Experimental RFC.  This 
is how
the older (usually more successful) IETF worked.  And that approach 
seems
to have been a lot more successful than the current "standardise before
we have adequate operational experience" approach has been.  And 
publishing
the Enns' I-D as Experimental does not even require us to wait for a WG
to be formally created, so it can really be done right now, rather than
after a few months.]

IMHO,

Ran
rja@extremenetworks.com




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