Re: Separation of protocol and information model

[Andy Bierman <abierman@cisco.com>]

At 06:06 PM 9/3/2003, Bobby Krupczak wrote:
>Hi!
>
>>I think there's a division between what the configuration can contain
>>and how it can be manipulated.  What I'd like to see is a protocol that
>>can take a chunk of opaque configuration and load it only a router, with
>>the maximum degree of reliability, recoverability, and transactionality
>>available in the device's software.
>
>>The content is the device's data model, which netconf is avoiding.
>>The management is what we're trying to solve.  I can make fairly
>>simple xslt scripts to turn a generic definition of what I want a vpn
>>to look like into a set of configurations for each involved device
>>(and to make it vendor/product/release specific).  I just need
>>a simple and robust mechanism for loading those deltas onto devices.
>>
>>At the same time, I want an extensible mechanism so that applications
>>can take advantage of features like candidate configuration, rollback,
>>locking, named configurations, etc.  And I want something open to
>>future extensions so that the Next Great Idea (tm) can be added
>>incrementally to both devices and applications.  When my
>>time-travel-based pre-corrective measure project comes to fruition, I
>>want to be able to see it get used without having to travel back to
>>now and add it to this spec. ;^)
>
>I'm having a difficult time seeing how the working group can really
>pull this off and come up with something that really benefits the
>Internet community.  That is, is the resulting standardized protocol
>really worth it.  W/o tackling (e.g. standardizing on) some of the
>data-model (not necessarily in the protocol but in accompanying docs),
>is this effort worthwhile?  It almost seems to be like standardizing
>on SNMP w/o any standard-mibs.  While the ability to have
>private-enterprise mibs was a key to SNMP's success, not having
>standard MIBs would have surely killed it.  In essence, the Internet
>Management Framework community was specifying what it meant to manage
>a device and in term, it was specifying what and how devices should
>handle management information.

Just because netconf 1.0 is not working on standard data models
doesn't mean there won't be any standard data models.  The ADs
want to see a well thought out proposal on how to proceed on
the data modelling language and standard data models.  So far,
nobody has been willing to write up a meaningful proposal.
Hopefully this will happen before the netconf protocol is
done.   

Hopefully there will be faster progress than for SNMP.
After about 14 years of standard MIB development, there 
are still very few MIBs for configuration.  This is 
because standardizing configuration knobs is hard and
SNMP/SMI is not well-suited for configuration management.
IMO it will take several years until standard XML data
models for configuration are defined and deployed.  But
we have to start sometime, and that's what we're doing.


>At this point, these comments are probably not terribly helpful to the
>working group as the charter, focus, and specs are already underway.
>
>I'll probably have to partially re-invent the wheel as I'm really look
>for a bit broader and deeper replacement for SNMP.
>
>Thanks,
>
>Bobby

Andy


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