Re: Where do we go from here?

[RJ Atkinson <rja@extremenetworks.com>]

On Saturday, August 10, 2002, at 03:09 PM, Randy Bush wrote:
> and this begs the question if all vendors support fingers that
> can be stuck in locations.
	I think it is a given that some vendors will have "features" that
are not implemented by all vendors.  This argues that one might want
a syntax that is easily extensible (with vendor-specific extensions),
if one has a common configuration syntax at all.

	I'm a bit doubtful that any IETF standardisation process for the syntax
of a config file would work well enough (and fast enough) for the IETF 
syntax
to be widely deployed.  IETF would take too long and operators would run 
with
vendor-specific extensions at the point the operators needed to tweak 
that
configuration knob.  Once an operator had already run with the 
vendor-specific
knob, there would be little incentive to change a working provisioning 
system
later on.

	On the other hand, IETF might have a good chance of defining
a mini-RPC-like thing that let operators push/pull/other the 
configuration
blobs (even implementation-specific blobs).  And IETF has a very good 
chance
of writing a spec/profile/whatever on how such blobs get moved on the 
wire
between a configuration system and a device being configured.

Ran
rja@extremenetworks.com



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