Subject: AgentX Implementations and Products

From: "Bert Wijnen" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 May 99 15:04:35 DST

Ref:  Your note of Mon, 10 May 1999 13:29:22 +0200

Subject: Re:   AgentX Implementations and Products

Juergen, remove IBM Research from the list. We do not have an
implementation, and as far as I know, there is none in IBM.

Bert

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 10 May 1999 14:13:39 +0100

> I am wondering how many implementations of AgentX we have and whether
> someone is already shipping AgentX in products.

We develop some applications to which I wanted to add SNMP
support a year or more ago. These products run on many platforms
(several unixs, NT, Windows95/98). None of these platforms
had standardised ways to access the system SNMP agent, so I
decided we would implement AgentX in our application and hope
that the operating system vendors would come up with AgentX
support which we could plug into. In the mean time, we would
produce shims to convert AgentX to/from the proprietry SNMP
interfaces in the operating systems, but only minimal
implementations sufficient for our needs in the hope these
would be thrown out in favour of vendor supplied equivalents.

To date, we have only produced a shim on NT, as that is the main
platform on which there was demand for SNMP support. I am
really trying to hold off doing any more in the hope the vendors
will, but I see no signs yet (someone please tell me I'm wong!).
I fear I will have to produce something for Solaris and HP-UX
as I don't think the vendors will do so before our customers
demand us to.

When the CMU AgentX implementation became available, we
checked that we could interwork with that (and exchanged some
mail and fixes with the author).

-- 
Andrew Gabriel                    [email-masked]
Consultant Software Engineer              Tel: +44 1582 830544
NET-TEL Computer Systems Limited,         Fax: +44 1582 830501
4 Place Farm, Wheathampstead, Herts, AL4 8SB, UK.

---

From: Bob Natale <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 May 1999 11:46:39 -0400

>At 5/10/99:09:13 AM, [email-masked] wrote:

Hi Andrew,

Let me use your message to provide some general feedback
(both as WG Chair and as a general marketplace participant)
on this thread responding to Juergen's query:

>>I am wondering how many implementations of AgentX we have
>>and whether someone is already shipping AgentX in products.

As you can see from the Juegen's list and the follow-up
responses thus far, implementation work re AgentX is
proceeding at a number of sites.  Products based on the
first version of RFC2257 are either at customers' sites
(sometimes w/o an official product release yet) or in the
pipeline from a variety of providers.

Work on AgentX specifications and products has been in a
fairly deep lull for the past several months.  In the
beginning of this period, that did not present a problem
since we (the community at-large) had plenty to do with
SNMPv3, SMIv2, and DISMAN, all of which have made very good
progress.  Now it is time for AgentX to run its leg of this
relay race!

The latter part of this lull has been due to a lack of
availability on the part of the WG Editor.  He (and I!) had
hoped and expected this would be a temporary situation.  He
has made several valiant attempts to get back in the race.
Unfortunately, just in the past week he had to admit that
the future looked bleak (in this respect only!) and asked
to be relieved of the obligation.

So, we are now looking for a new editor (I volunteered, but the
IESG frowns on the WG Chair also performing this functino).  If
any of you would like to volunteer, please contact me directly.
I will give you a frank appriasal of the workload and expectations.
The biggest problem that will confront the new editor is timeframe
...the revised docs (MIB and protocol) are basically ready for this
final editing pass--formatting (nroff), proof-reading, cross-
consistency checks, technical solidity, etc.

<...comments/questions re OS vendor support for AgentX...>

Wrt "NT" (Win2K0, I can only say that I am hopeful that
Microsoft will eventually have an AgentX solution...one
which either integrates their existing system agent into
a Microsoft AgentX master agent or one which offers their
system agent implemented as an AgentX sub-agent for use
with whatever AgentX master agent the customer may acquire
from some third-party source.  At the moment, however, I
have *no* information to make that anything more than just
a hopeful expectation on my part...it's total personal
speculation (and perhaps just wishful thinking!).

>checked that we could interwork with that (and exchanged
>some mail and fixes with the author).

That is great.  I think that Mike Daniele still offers
some remote testing opportunities re the Compaq/Digital
implementation(s).  And, if we can resolve the editing
task and advance (in the technical sense, not necessarily
the IESG sense) the docs in the coming weeks, we might
still plan another bake-off session for late Summer or
early Fall.

Cordially,

BobN
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