Re: a different view of SNMP

["Alex P. Rudnev" <alex () Relcom EU net>]

Phil, you just read my mind... One more word - and you should reverse the 
data tree by this way to allow 'wildcard' requests and to allow easily 
add vendor branch to the every part of the tree.

LDAP was (in this discussion) an other interesting idea, too.

Alex (R).
> IMHO, the ideal compromise would be a TCP based program that would take a
> full set of information requests, gather all of the data in an atomic way
> so that time domain analysis is at least consistent (maybe even an option
> to schedule data collection at a precise time and pick it up later), and
> dump all of that data rapidly back over a single connection.  If I were to
> embark on implementing such a thing right now, I'd probably do it as a
> POST method within HTTP, defining a new MIME type to encapsulate the bulk
> request, and a new MIME type to encapsulate the bulk response.  Authentication
> would be in the HTTP request and headers.  You specify all the MIBs you want,
> including range and pattern requests, and all the responses have all the MIB
> types attached.  The MIBs could be encoded as dotted decimal or hexadecimal,
> but I'd definitely _not_ use ASN.1/BER (everything will be "text safe").
> If the device just doesn't have the resources to handle a large request
> (such as not enough memory to record a snapshot of what you want to see all
> at once), then the time-atomic aspect will have to be abandoned and the data
> will then be picked up, encoded, and delivered sequentially.  But the one
> important thing is that it will be possible to request "everything" all at
> once, if desired (and I desire it).

> The problem with this is that it will take getting business managers to
> recognize there is a problem.  But business managers are not really into the
> kinds of raw information that technical people are into.  Business managers
> are more into pretty color graphics.  Then when they see pretty colored
> graphics as tools for their very expnsive investments (e.g. the deployment
> of all those backbone routers) they feel all warm and fuzzy all over, and
> expect the technical people to feel the same (which works fine in a totally
> manually operated environment, and falls apart in a programmed, highly
> automated environment).
>
> --
> Phil Howard           KA9WGN
> phil () intur net phil () ipal net

Aleksei Roudnev, Network Operations Center, Relcom, Moscow
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