Re: Deja vu Again

[Andy Bierman <abierman@cisco.com>]

At 03:56 PM 6/26/2002, David T. Perkins wrote:
>HI,
>
>Say the below is the goal. What is to be "standardized"?
>Is there a standard for cisco config?
>Another standard for Juniper config?
>Yet another standard for each of vendors X, Y, and Z?

I think the configuration mechanisms can be separated from the
configuration commands.  Although standardizing one without the
other seems to many people to be 'not that interesting', it can't
be denied that even deployment of this much would be a step forward.

Eliot listed some non-command goals that I will borrow from:
   - choice of application protocol(s)
   - choice of transport protocol(s)
   - security model and protocol(s)
   - session establishment
   - namespace management (std and enterprise)
   - high level configuration operations, such as
        create, edit, delete, multi-command blocks, show config, 
        commit-to-named-config (NV-store), restore-from-named-config
   - base set of error responses

As Ran pointed out, these goals address the needs of script writers
who are currently parsing CLI sessions (screen scraping) in order
to load router/switch configurations.  There is no attempt to
address the lack of standard configuration commands.  It's quite
possible that the content of these PDUs will look remarkably
similar to proprietary CLI for which the spaces have been replaced
by angle brackets (see Junoscript reference for an example).
The PDUs may contain MIB objects converted to XML, or maybe a WG or
an industry consortium will create some more common XML commands.
Since XML is self-documenting and every namespace is like another
sandbox, there are many possibilities for the PDU content.

Andy



>At 10:35 AM 6/26/2002 -0400, Rob Austein wrote:
>>At Wed, 26 Jun 2002 07:25:51 -0400, Jon Saperia wrote:
>>> 
>>> On the other hand if one wanted to create an XML based flat file 
>>> represenation of configuration information, regardless of how one got it 
>>> to the box in the first place, or even if it is on the intended device, 
>>> then that would be something that I think has some real value.
>>
>>Bingo!  This was my understanding of the goal.
>
>Regards,
>/david t. perkins
>
>
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