Re: Question About Task #6 in the Charter

[Jennifer Rexford <jrex@research.att.com>]

> I am confused by the need to select or define a new protocol. Should
> the same protocol be used for packet selection, report, and export? Is
> this sampler MIB an SMIv2 MIB?

Good question.  It seems that we need to clearly identify what
variables would be configurable, and and then we need to decide 
how they might be configured.  We could take an approach of

  - SNMP MIB, allowing the use of a standard protocol (but requiring
    operators to enable "set" operations on their boxes)

  - a new protocol for configuring psamp devices (with the advantages
    and disadvantages of decoupling from SNMP)

  - unspecified, allowing the vendors to create their own commands
    in their repsective configuration languages

It seems unappealing to define a new protocol for configuring psamp
devices -- vendors would have to build to it, and operators would have
to find network management systems that support it.  (That said, this
might not be so bad, though, if we envision that psamp scenarios would
typically involve configuration of the measurement devices by the
collection server(s) that will receive and process the psamp records.)

In any case, rather than introducing a new protocol, one thought would
be to have a combination of #1 and #2 -- by defining the necessary
SNMP MIBs, but also realizing that vendors might also make the psamp
devices configurable via the command-line interface or other non-standard
configuration mechanisms (e.g., Telnet/CLI).

-- Jen
    




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