action RPC I-D

[Andy Bierman <ietf@andybierman.com>]

Hi,

Balazs Lengyel has written a brief draft for a Generic Action RPC:

http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-lengyel-action-rpc-00.txt

I think this might be relevant to our initial data modeling efforts,
and possibly the Notifications work as well.

First, the WG needs to decide how it wants to add features (as extensions)
to the protocol.  I am personally less comfortable with an ad-hoc,
approach than a designed approach.  Notifications were left over
from the initial charter, not really an add-on.

Why is this new special standard RPC method needed?
What increased multi-vendor interoperability does it provide?
What exactly is an "action"?
It is not defined in this document.

I know "reboot" is an action.
What about "save and reboot" (which changes
config and then does an action)?

IMO, the agent and manager MUST know the security and
other requirements a priori anyway (via a schema), so
some generic 'container' for actions does not provide any
real value -- just extra XML.

In your 'restart' example, 'actionName' could just as well be
the actual RPC method name, and 'callingPoint' is really
just an RPC parameter, along with the entire 'parameters' sub-tree.

How do you manage the allocation of action names?
You propose just xs:string as a data type, and all these
unbounded strings are in the NETCONF namespace.
This implies the WG is going to define the contents,
but that is not stated in the draft.

Do we really need a standard "action" RPC method container,
without defining any actual standard actions?

thanks,
Andy






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