RE: Is beep really what operators would want?

["Little, Kevin C (IP)" <kclittle@enterasys.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kevin C Miller [mailto:kevinm@andrew.cmu.edu]
> Sent: Wednesday, June 18, 2003 10:55 AM
> To: netconf@ops.ietf.org
> Subject: RE: Is beep really what operators would want?
> 
> > I'd be fired if I attempted to bring out a new product without a
CLI!
> >
> > I barely accept the common wisdom that XML is human-readable; IMO,
> > it is human-decipherable at best. It is certainly not
human-writeable in
> > the sense that a good CLI is.
> 
> I wouldn't expect to see "big" routers shipped without CLIs, but on
the
> lower end I could see this tradeoff. I think xmlconf can be useful
here,
> but may be done in lieu of other methods. I've seen this tradeoff in
> product manageable only via SNMP.

Point taken. But at the low end you'd never expose XML to the user
anyway, be it inside BEEP or something else. The interface is going to
be a browser form, not a multi-line textual interface of any kind.

My point is this: Yes, using BEEP interactively is obviously
impractical, given the need for a total byte count in the frame header.
But I don't buy the implicit assumption that any human operator would
want to use an XML-based *RPC* "by hand" in the first place,
screen-scraping notwithstanding. 

Maybe I'm wrong here; do really good NOC-jocks fly JUNOScript "by hand"?
(By choice???)

Regards,
      -k



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