[147320] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Writable SNMP
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Wes Hardaker)
Wed Dec 7 00:23:23 2011
From: Wes Hardaker <wjhns61@hardakers.net>
To: Keegan Holley <keegan.holley@sungard.com>
Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2011 21:21:50 -0800
In-Reply-To: <CABO8Q6QsPUDv88SJKAEn2VutE7s0fdLpSLGL2dAo54UvSDr_PA@mail.gmail.com>
(Keegan Holley's message of "Tue, 6 Dec 2011 11:07:44 -0500")
Cc: NANOG <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
>>>>> On Tue, 6 Dec 2011 11:07:44 -0500, Keegan Holley <keegan.holley@sungard.com> said:
KH> Admittedly, you will have to deal with proprietary mibs and reformat
KH> the data once it's returned.
That's the nail in the coffin of just about every configuration
protocol. Until multiple vendors implement a common model, no
technology is going to work. SNMP certainly suffered from multiple
vendors doing different things in their private MIBs while also
implementing the standard MIBs is a standard way.
You could probably get two vendors (X and Y) to agree that all
devices have N interfaces with M-bit counters to represent traffic. The
problem, especially with configuration, comes when vendor X uses virtual
interfaces (eth0:1) to model interfaces with multiple addresses and
vendor Y uses a single interface identifier with a sub-tail to list all
the addresses assigned to the interface. Now this problem is at least
solvable, given enough code, to take a configuration set from one device
and covert it to the other, which in part is the goal of netconf: to
enable a language that will hopefully allow a transformation process to
succeed and thus bring about the holy grail of a singular management
protocol.
But in the end, every problem will still end up in the odd case where
vendor X produces a config set with 2 "rows" and vendor Y produces a
config set with 3 "rows" and no magical transformation can possibly get
from point A to point B because the data models simply don't align. At all.
When the internals aren't compatable, there isn't a data model to be
written. No matter if it's in txt, SMIv2, XML, yang or moon dust.
And hence the reason homogeneous networks with rdist distributed config
files were born.
--
Wes Hardaker
