Re: Where do we go from here?

[Andy Bierman <abierman@cisco.com>]

At 12:20 PM 8/10/2002 -0400, Rob Austein wrote:
>Well, at the risk of both stating the obvious and adding yet another
>spin vector to all this, let me add my two zorkmids.
>
>The application in this space for which XML seems like a possible good
>fit is configuration files.  I know this is the IETF and we do wire
>protocols here, but sometimes we need to talk about files too.

I agree that XML config files are interesting, but this is not the only
application that is a good fit.  Screen-scraper applications which
attempt to parse show command output or syslog messages
can also benefit a great deal from XML formatted data.  

Andy



>We've got a bunch of protocols for fiddling with the state or
>configuration of boxes on the fly, and I certainly would not want to
>give those up, but when it comes right down to it, one is often much
>more concerned with what a box will do after the next time it reboots
>than with what it is doing right now.  I could state this in a more
>extreme fashion: at least in my experience, when one is managing a
>critical piece of equipment, the question of "will the box do the
>right thing when it reboots?" is so important that the preferred way
>of making configuration changes is to modify the box's configuration
>file[*] then trigger a reboot to see whether the wretched thing comes
>up correctly.
>
>So when I hear people talking about XML configuration, what I think of
>is (a) some kind of XML structure for this sort of thing and (b) a set
>of templates (or schemas, or whatever the heck they're called in the
>XML universe) that allow one to configure the things that every device
>in a certain catagory will need to have configured.  XML certainly is
>not the only way to build such a configuration file mechanism, but (as
>others have mentioned) it has some nice properties and there are a lot
>of tools available for it, so it's a potentially interesting approach.
>
>SSH2 would be a fine way to ship such configuration files around, so I
>suspect that Ran and I are at least partially on the same page here.
>
>I'll let Margaret figure out how (and if) the above rant fits into her
>overall taxonomy, she's better at that than I am.
>
>[*] Yes, I am all too aware that some devices do not have disks or
>    even much in the way of non-volatile storage.  But either (a) they
>    have -something- in the way of some kind of structured
>    non-volatile storage (even if it's only a small chunk of flash
>    that contains a binary image of in-memory data structures for some
>    programming language or another), (b) they can suck down a
>    configuration file somehow (perhaps via TFTP with an HMAC
>    integrity check), or (c) they really need to be configured on the
>    fly every time they come up.  (c) is a prefectly reasonable way to
>    build certain kinds of boxes, but perhaps their needs are
>    sufficiently different that trying to configure such boxes with
>    the same mechanisms we use to configure backbone routers is not a
>    productive approach.
>
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