-----Original Message-----
From: owner-netconf@ops.ietf.org
[mailto:owner-netconf@ops.ietf.org] On Behalf Of Andy Bierman
Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2006 8:19 AM
To: Netconf (E-mail)
Subject: requirement: agent initiated session support
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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