Re: Scope of NIM

[Keith McCloghrie <kzm@cisco.com>]

Walter,

It's not "would be" but rather "has been", and it's not just been me.
Rather, the RAP WG has encouraged this through their comments over the
last 6 or more months (e.g., Juergen's comments in email and in
Pittsburgh, and comments from Bert and others at the microphone in
Adelaide).  The result is that the SPPI has become what amounts to a
superset of the SMI.  This is the existing, "short-term" effort towards
convergence that I mentioned at the BOF.  It's short-term because the
RAP WG has agreed that the SPPI is close to Last Call.  It has not, and
will not achieve full convergence - no existing effort will.

For full convergence a new IETF effort is needed, and I also spoke to
this issue at the BOF.  Specifically, I suggested that the NMRG has
been working on SMIng (indeed, Juergen presented it at the IETF Plenary).
One of the roles of the NMRG is to work on topics which are not yet
ready for standardization, and I believe they have done that with the
SMIng.  Assuming that the IETF agrees that SMIng is the future
direction for the SMI, then it makes no sense to specify any changes to
the SMI (which are presumably needed by SMI/SPPI convergence) unless
those changes are done within the context of SMIng.  Therefore, I
believe that full convergence should be achieved within the context of
SMIng.  To achieve this, we need an SMIng WG.  I don't see that NIM has
any role to play in this, and in fact I think it's counter-productive
for NIM to contemplate such a role because of the uncertainty and debate
surrounding NIM (as is reflected in the minutes of the BOF).

Therefore, I suggest that in the aftermath of the NIM BOF, the topic
which this mailing-list has to consider is what to do about an
Information Model.

In fact, given what "NIM" stands for, it seems to me that this
completes the full circle back to where this effort started :-).

Keith.


> John,
> 
> Please review the minutes for NIM, SNMPv3, and O&M Area. The general desire
> for convergence discussed in all three meetings. Further, the SPPI authors
> (Keith specifically) indicated that he would be working on this in RAP.
> 
> regards,
> 
> -Walter
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: John Schnizlein [mailto:jschnizl@cisco.com]
> > Sent: Monday, August 21, 2000 9:49 PM
> > To: Weiss, Walter; Andrea Westerinen; NIM
> > Subject: Re: Scope of NIM
> > 
> > 
> > At 02:22 PM 08/21/2000 -0400, Weiss, Walter wrote: 
> > > ... At the last IETF, there was a strong desire to see SMI 
> > and SPPI converge.
> > 
> > Whose desire? What sort of convergence?
> > 
> > SPPI was deliberately diverged from SMI.
> > What was retained was the ability to automatically generate MIBs
> > to get the value of parameters (implicitly) set by PIBs.
> > 
> > John
> >