Subject: Re: for your edification and thorough enjoyment

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 7 Nov 96 11:53:44 PST

Fred,

I think that we had always expected that there would be provision
for administratively establishing reservation state in a router.

I thought the conclusion at the RSVP WG meeting was that this
should be done using SNMP (and therefore be in the int-serv MIB),
rather than by creating fake RSVP messages, whose semantics
would be unclear.

Bob

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From: [email-masked] (Fred Baker)
Date: Thu, 7 Nov 1996 13:47:24 -0800

>rather than by creating fake RSVP messages, whose semantics

So you want to be able to write to the RSVP Flow Table (as opposed to the
ST-II Flow Table, or some other flow table)?

Done. That's there.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
I don't suffer from insanity.  I enjoy every minute of it.

 or function generally doesn't specify anything
    that wasn't specified somewhere else. A MIB is, by definition, a list of
    the knobs that can be tweaked and attributes that can be read, to manage
    the thing it is the MIB for. Concepts are never introduced in the MIB;
    the MIB is a machine readable codification of concepts inherent in the
    thing being managed.

Integrated services doesn't define a "reservation", nor does it speak at
all about how to identify the thing a reservation might apply to. The
latter turns out to be fairly important - a reservation doesn't mean very
much apart from the identification of what the reservation applies to.
Integrated Services says "for some definition of a reservation for some set
of traffic which is identified in some way, the flow behavior attributes of
such a reservation would be this."

One definition of a "reservation" might be "for the set of unfragmented
<protocol> traffic from application <address, transport protocol, port> to
application <address, port>, during the period during which <policy>
applies, this traffic needs to have certain integrated services
characteristics." Another such definition might be "for the traffic on
ST-II stream <number>, this traffic needs to have certain integrated
services characteristics.". Another definition might be "for all <protocol>
traffic from <cidr prefix> to <cidr prefix>, this traffic needs to have
certain integrated services characteristics." There are most certainly
other definitions.

JJ and I have taken the perspective that, for the moment, the first
definition of a reservation is in view. In something like the RSVP MIB,
ST-II might address the second definition. For this reason, you will find
the integrated services objects related to an RSVP Flow called out in the
RSVP MIB, and would find them likewise in a corrollary ST-II MIB. I tend to
think that the third is by no means out of bounds. But trying to put
arbitrary reservations without the other context into the IS MIB seemed
very strained when we tried to do it.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
I don't suffer from insanity.  I enjoy every minute of it.