Subject: [ipfix-arch] Configuration and capabilities negotiation

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 09 Feb 2002 09:28:43 +0100 (CET)

Hi all,

Our charter says we should "select a protocol by which IP flow information 
can be transferred in a timely fashion from an "exporter" to a collection 
station or stations". There is no mentioning of configuring the meter and
exporter, just of transferring flow information.

I think that configuration should be done out of band. Either by another
protocol or MIB (for which to develop we are not chartered) or by
traditional CLI (as usual).

Adding configuration to the protocol would make it very complicated.
We would need another data model just for configuring the device.
In my view this significanlty violates the general KISS requirement
every IP protocol should meet.

Further, our AD stated that we are standardizing common practice,
and common practice is CLI configuration.

As for capability negotiations, I have the same concern about keeping
it simple. Definitely, I do not like to have any NEGOTIATION. If we
really think it is necessary we might have the data collector requesting
a set of attributes to be part of the flow record. 

But even this complicates an implementation significantly. If we 
consider several collectors receiving data from the same reporter, 
then we have to save a record format for each collector, configure 
the metering process such that all collectors are covered and export 
individual records to each collector.

This would be a lot of work to implement it on a router. Much easier
is having a single configuration via CLI including a specification of
collectors to which identical records are to be sent. 

Please consider that the meter will be built partially in hardware 
which is costly. Here we can save a lot by reducing some functions.
The data collector implemented by software can be much more flexible
with less cost.

So lets have a protocol which is more flexible as NetFlow version
1-7, but not much more complicated, in order to be successfully
accepted by hardware vendors and application programmers.

Cheers,

    Juergen
--
Juergen Quittek     [email-masked]     Tel: +49 6221 90511-15
NEC Europe Ltd.,    Network Laboratories     Fax: +49 6221 90511-55
Adenauerplatz 6, 69115 Heidelberg, Germany   http://www.ccrle.nec.de 

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