Subject: [Netconf] Some discussion points re: RFC 5277bis and YANG push

From: "Alexander Clemm (alex)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2016 23:18:41 +0000

Hi,

draft-gonzalez-netconf-5277bis is another one of the drafts in the set of drafts concerning event notifications and yang-push.

One of the items wort bringing for discussion concerns the notion of control plane notifications that are used to indicate the status of a notification subscription.  Examples of such notifications are "replayComplete", "subscription-modified" (in case case of configured subscriptions), and "subscription-suspended" (of particular importance for draft-ietf-netconf-yang-push, another draft in the set, used by the server to notify a client in case notification updates cannot be sent as promised under various rainy-day scenarios).

What makes those notifications different from other notifications is that they are not of general concern, but of concern only for a particular association.  As a subscriber to event notifications, I should only receive those notifications that concern "my" subscription, not those that concern someone else's subscription.

The way we are planning to address this is through introduction of an extension "control-plane-notif".  This extension is used to tag definitions of notifications used for control / signaling purposes that are therefore not part of the general NETCONF event stream.  Instead, notifications thus tagged are part of a signaling event stream that is part of the signaling/control association implied by the subscription.  Like push-notifications themselves, there is a need to distinguish notifications subscribable by everyone and notification instances used by a server to notify items of significance to a specific client, or set of clients.  Please refer also to section 7 of the draft (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-gonzalez-netconf-5277bis-02#section-7 ).

We have been discussing this issue as part of the weekly calls in which a subteam of NETCONF WG participants are discussing the set of of related drafts and think this is one of the issues that we should bring to  the attention of and solicit feedback from the WG as a whole.

Thoughts?
--- Alex
(on behalf of the team)