What's wrong with provisioning tools?

Wed Jun 12 17:38:18 UTC 2002

A couple of times during NANOG25, from the floor and from the podium,
it was identified that the tools available for managing networks were
garbage. I was surprised to hear  that even real basics, such as change
control and configuration management, weren't widely adopted. There
definitely seemed to be an acceptance (and perhaps this is only true at
some carriers) that many problems facing providers today are as a result
of a dearth of decent tools to configure 'best common practices' into
the routers - and as a result of this, the 'problems' with the networks
were not with the h/w and/or the protocols they support, but with the
people, and their lack of experience and/or ability to properly
configure the boxes.

A couple of comments that I heard over the last few days:
1) User interfaces are horrible and counter intuitive - I want 'xyz' out
of my GUI
2) Systems blindly apply bad configurations to routers - they should be
able to do 'some' verification before crashing my network - and can't
roll back after they wreck things
3) Change control either doesn't exist, isn't usable, or isn't granular
enough
4) There isn't anything to track non sanctioned changes to the network
(i.e.: hacker induced re-configurations)

I would very much like to hear about "specific" needs for (provisioning)
tools that would satisfy your needs - needs that are either being poorly
met to today, or not at all. In the hopes of preventing a vendor-bash
extravaganza, I would suggest as a point of reference, that the NMS
recommendations presented by Avi Freedman during the conference
("Industry/Government Infrastructure Vulnerability Assessment:
Background and Recommendations". Of the recommendations pertinent to
network management, many refer to future-features. As an additional
attempt to constraint the discussion, I would recommend that the needs
identified be realistic (i.e.: supportable on current equipment, the
cost of the solution would be less than the cost of the problem, etc).

Cheers,
David

-
David Daley 
+1.905.922.6560 (global) 
daley at montagueriver.com 
www.montagueriver.com 
Montague River Networks Inc. 

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