NETCONF clarifications

["Peter, Christian" <Christian.Peter@keymile.com>]

Hi,
I have been reading the NETCONF standard and noticed a lot of common
things with
our XML management infrastructure.
We are considering to also adding the NETCONF standard to our product.
Now some
questions are coming up. Probably some questions are out of scope of the
NETCONF
protocol or maybe already discussed or even stupid:-).
I apologize ahead of time if the question I'm asking has already been
answered,
but I would really appreciate it, if someone could give me some
clarifications.

Non-configuration data (commands):
In the RFC it's not mention about setting non-configuration data (e.g.
setting clock time).
Is there any good way to do this.  In our system we have such a
functionality mapped
with following structure: 
- operation name
- in parameters  (only for the request)
- out parameters (only for the reply)

Should the data directly wrapped in the <rpc>?

<rpc>
 <operation-name>
   <in parameters>
    ...
 </operation-name>
</rpc>

<rpc-reply>
 <operation-name>
   <out parameters>
    ...
 </operation-name>
</rpc-replay>
 
Timeout:
Requests can have some time to process. A example could be the
<copy-config> or
gathering a lot of statistics at once. Is there any timeout behaviour or
feedback
mechanism to the client, when processing for a longer time (e.g. 15
minutes). 

Attachments:
I see that NETCONF is mainly an interface for configuration and status.
But are
there any ideas of having some mechanism to attach real binary data
(e.g. firmware)
to a request or reply? 


Regards,
Christian


Christian Peter
R & D Software Switzerland 
---------------------------------------- 
KEYMILE AG
Schwarzenburgstrasse 73
CH-3097 Berne-Liebefeld, Switzerland
www.keymile.com

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