Writable SNMP

Wes Hardaker wjhns61 at hardakers.net
Wed Dec 7 05:21:50 UTC 2011


>>>>> On Tue, 6 Dec 2011 11:07:44 -0500, Keegan Holley <keegan.holley at 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                                     




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