RE: sming meeting minutes draft... Questions for the wg.

["Harrington, David" <dbh@enterasys.com>]

Hi,

I once interviewed for a job with a company that had two products. One product was the brand new product based on the latest programming langauges, and that product got plenty of resources, promotion, etc., and was the product one wanted to be associated with because that was the product that company management obviously valued. The other product was being discontinued, but required support until its successor was ready. The people who worked on that product were likely to be denied resources, marketing would not promote the product, and at some point the resources associated with that product would be eliminated. They had trouble finding people motivated to work on the discontinued product.

The IETF needs to make a decision about what role they want SNMP and the SMI and COPS/PR and SPPI to play. If they want to discontinue them and replace them with XML, then let's close down all related work and move everybody to the new product, and get the new product ready faster. If the IETF wants to keep them, but continue to maintain them until the replacement is ready, then SMI and EOS seem to be overshooting the goal; we should keep mib development, but not bother to work on changing the protocol or the SMI.

I fail to be motivated to work on these documents, or to recruit people from my company to work on these documents, because I cannot see what role SNMP and SMIv3 are expected to play in the future of IETF network management. 

Note that I said that the IETF needs to make a decision, not that the ADs need to make a decision. I have argued for an architecture, and the ADs have responded they do not want to dictate a top-down architecture. I agree that such is a wise decision on their part. The IETF participants of the O&M Area need to make thei rvoices heard as to what they want for the future of O&M directions, especially network management. In my discussions with NM folk at the last IETF meeting, there was a tremendous lack of enthusiasm. I think it was because most people feel the same way; we don't want to work on a protocol that is being discontinued. 

I think that what Bert is asking is, "do you care enough about keeping SNMP going to volunteer to do some of the work of keeping SNMP going?"

My personal answer is that I think there are simpler solutions that will yield better results for making SNMP useful to people now, within the limited monitoring role that seems to be the IETF future for SNMP. I suggest there is more potential short-term benefit from projects like a compressed PDU, a key distribution mechanism for SNMPv3, AES support for SNMPv3, informational documents that describe how to use the mibs that already exist so agent developers can understand why they should support all the different objects in a mib (and so we can eliminate the really non-useful objects in the standard mibs), and small scripts written in Perl or Ksh or whatever to give operators the tools to test whether mibs have been reasonably well implemented before they commit to final purchase of products. These types of activities would hopefully improve the quality and deployability of the SNMP solutions that already exist, to make SNMP more useful to operators.

my $.02
dbh

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Durham, David [mailto:david.durham@intel.com]
> Sent: Monday, December 16, 2002 4:53 PM
> To: 'Wijnen, Bert (Bert)'; sming@ops.ietf.org
> Subject: RE: sming meeting minutes draft... Questions for the wg.
> 
> 
> Originally there was much excitement around the smi-ds 
> proposal from the wg
> participants. Now that we are peeling back the onion a bit I 
> think we are
> seeing some of the complexities of this approach emerge, and we are
> experiencing some notable feature creep as well. So I wonder if the wg
> sentiment is cooling and why. Two fundamental questions that 
> I would like
> people to (quickly) respond:
> 
> Are people still interested in perusing the hierarchical 
> instance naming
> using oids as proposed in the smi-ds document? 
> 
> Are you interested in helping by being an editor on one or more of the
> documents listed below?
> 
> 
> If feature creep and gratuitous changes are the only issues, that is
> fixable. I want to understand if the fundamentals of the 
> smi-ds proposal are
> still viable and have wg support.
> 
> -Dave
> 
> 
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Wijnen, Bert (Bert) [mailto:bwijnen@lucent.com]
> > Sent: Monday, December 16, 2002 4:48 AM
> > To: Durham, David; sming@ops.ietf.org
> > Subject: RE: sming meeting minutes draft...
> > 
> > I'd like to get a few more details on this (I think we got them
> > at the meeting):
> > 
> > > Revisited Charter and Milestones. Updated charter was put on
> > > the mailing list. No issues raised on the list, no issues
> > > raised at the meeting either. According to the charter
> > > milestones we are a year behind. The original milestones
> > > assumed the nmrg documents which were complete, but the wg
> > > chose to investigate the smi-ds route. We will still need a
> > > few iterations on the smi-ds/v3 documents before they will be
> > > complete. The current proposed list of documents in 
> priority order is:
> > >
> > > -        1. SMIv3 Language Definition: Andy Bierman
> > > -        2. Capabilities MIB: Andy Bierman: DONE
> > > -        3. SMIv3 Guidelines
> > > -        4. Transition from SMIv2
> > > -        5. SMIv3 MIB Modules (core types)
> > > -        6. INET Modules (textual conventions)
> > > -        7. RFC 2580 Conformance Updates
> > >
> > > We need volunteers for the documents or the wg will shut
> > > down, and the smi will not progress. Previous volunteers for
> > > the guidelines and transition documents are waiting for the
> > > language definition. In principle, people support the smi-ds
> > > work, but we will need people to sign up to get the work
> > > done. Likewise from the discussion at the wg meeting it seems
> > > that there is a lot of waffling on how we proceed item by
> > > item through the open issues listed below.
> > >
> > My understanding at the meeitng was that Andy 
> un-volunteered for some
> > docs. And so I like to clearly understand who is currently volunteer
> > for what. I also like to see commitments as follows:
> > 
> > - Volunteers to commit to deliver a reasonable revision of the
> >   document they volunteer for
> > - From the WG to do serious review and to provide serious input
> >   for the editors and the chair, so that we can get to consensus.
> > 
> > The lack of WG participation and the lack of enthusiastic volunteers
> > for all documents does not bode well. And as David said, we're
> > already 1 year behind schedule.
> > 
> > Thanks, Bert
> 
>