Subject: RE: I-D ACTION:draft-kulkarni-netconf-subagent-prot-00.txt

From: "Romascanu, Dan \(Dan\)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 18:15:41 +0200

A very good observation. The AgentX work happened after many years of
operational experience and deployment of 'monolithic' agents, and in the
conditions when at least three different software packages that I
remember were offering agent-subagent SNMP stacks. 

Dan
(contributor)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked] 
> [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Andy Bierman
> Sent: Thursday, October 05, 2006 6:00 PM
> To: Martin Bjorklund
> Cc: [email-masked]; [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: I-D ACTION:draft-kulkarni-netconf-subagent-prot-00.txt
> 
>  >...
> 
> > Anyway, I agree that this isn't high on the priority list, and we 
> > should probably collect real-world experience before doing this.
> > 
> 
> Agree 110%
> The AgentX work was done after many years of experience with 
> the SNMP protocol, and after multiple high-quality 
> implementations of a master-agent/sub-agent system.
> 
> > 
> > /martin
> 
> Andy
> 

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---

From: Juergen Schoenwaelder <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 10:12:43 +0200

> remember were offering agent-subagent SNMP stacks. 

Before we all start to be proud of the AgentX story, lets not forget
that sub-agent technology was invented very shortly after SNMP did see
the light (around 1990) and that attempts to standardize were kind of
blocked until 1996 and then it took then the usual IETF time to get
AgentX out in January 1998 (see RFC 1227 and RFC 1228 for early works
in this area or the special issue of the Simple Times, Volume 4,
Number 2 April, 1996).

A great deal of standardization work seems to be related to good
timing and I am not sure AgentX is an example we can be proud of in
terms of good timing.

/js

PS: I am not arguing for doing netconf subagent work now nor do I have
    an opinion whether such a standard is needed at all; I just think
    we need to be careful with the history.

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder		    International University Bremen
<http://www.eecs.iu-bremen.de/>	    P.O. Box 750 561, 28725 Bremen, Germany

---

From: "Randy Presuhn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 14:08:20 -0700

Hi -

> From: "Juergen Schoenwaelder" <[email-masked]>
> To: "Romascanu, Dan (Dan)" <[email-masked]>
> Cc: "Andy Bierman" <[email-masked]>; "Martin Bjorklund" <[email-masked]>; <[email-masked]>; <[email-masked]>
> Sent: Friday, October 06, 2006 1:12 AM
...
...

Indeed.  There was an incredible amount of well-entrenched political
opposition to pursuing any kind of subagent work, and lots of
disingenuous FUD.  Old-timers will recall the "dogs of a feather"
held in San Jose outside IETF auspices because
those in power at the time would not permit a BoF.

In the case of netconf, until there's an instance naming architecture
and we have some idea what data models are going to look like, I
think we'll just have to assume that netconf implementations will be
totally monolithic, despite all the limitations that that will entail for
large, complex, multi-vendor or dynamic systems.  With the very
limited applicability envisioned for netconf, this might not be a problem.

Randy