Re: Please review: draft-black-snmp-uri-06.txt

[Juergen Schoenwaelder <j.schoenwaelder@iu-bremen.de>]

On Thu, Jul 29, 2004 at 12:59:19PM -0700, David T. Perkins wrote:
 
> I'm still missing the intended usage of the SNMP URIs. I reread the
> intro paragraph, and I'm still confused.

The document talks about service URIs and object URIs. The motivation for
service URIs is spelled out quite clearly in the abstract and the
introduction. Let me paraphrase it for you: There are devices which use 
out-of-band IP interfaces for management purposes. These devices sometimes 
need to indicate where the management is located. SNMP service URIs have
been designed to support that requirement. The concrete example are
fibre channel storage area network devices where the management access
runs over IP and not over fibre channel natively.

I have prototyped another usage as part of the SNMP command line
interface (scli). The scli program accepts SNMP URIs as a mechanism
to locate SNMP agents. Instead of passing several command line options,
I simply pass a URI to scli which contains all the information for scli
to get started. (Scli discovers the SNMP version and the transport by
probing the agent and scli did this even before SNMP service URIs were
invented.)

The definition of object URIs was suggested by APP aerea folks and we
have gone through many variations to come up with what is now in the
draft.  I can imagine that they are quite convenient in configuration 
files such as MRTG configs and I am considering to add support for
object URIs to scli since they might be a convenient interface to
describe simple retrieval requests (which I sometimes have to use
while developing new manager side code).

If this does not help, please tell us more precisely what confuses you
and is missing from the document.

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder		    International University Bremen
<http://www.eecs.iu-bremen.de/>	    P.O. Box 750 561, 28725 Bremen, Germany