requirement: agent initiated session support

[Andy Bierman <andy@andybierman.com>]

Hi,

The current subscribe model does not support agent
initiated sessions at all.  There are 2 use cases
I think are important:

1) notification generator application
  Traditional model as in SNMP.
  Agent SW dedicated to notification generation
  (maybe an aggregator for multiple sub-agents)
  Agent connects to the notification receiver application
  and sends notifications as they are generated.

2) bootstrap (thin agent)
  Agent is initially configured with a
 (username, password, cofig-server-IP-addr) tuple.
 Agent boots and immediately connects to the config-server
 (manager role in netconf), and issues a <configure-me>
 notification (perhaps with some parameters). The config
 server then issues <rpc> edit-config or copy-config
 commands to finish bootstrapping the agent.


Boot-up Problem with Subscribe model:

Using the client-subscribe model, all of the initial
notifications generated upon system reboot will be
lost because the agent isn't connected to a manager
yet, and we have no NOTIFICATION-LOG-MIB.  Requiring
the agent to save all notifications because a manager
might connect someday and request them is a huge
memory burden and not likely to be supported.

In general, I don't really see the subscription model
as an improvement over the traditional configuration
data model approach.  Even when used in the client-initiated
mode, it isn't as efficient because the manager has to
re-enter the config-data every time (in the form of a
start-notifications RPC).  If the profile wasn't opaque
that could be used instead.

Andy






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