Subject: disman applications techincal discussion

From: Gideon Stupp <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 08:53:59 +0200

Hi all,

I would like to suggest adding a short technical discussion on Thursday
concerning
the distribution aspects of management applications. 
It turns out that there are many ways of implementing a distributed
management application and it seems worthwhile to discuss what people are
doing and how the existing disman primitives are used. We might even want to
go further and actually describe a framework for the distribution of
management apps.

This suggestion may sound suspiciously like the "Distributed Management
Framework" ID written by Bierman et al. in 1998, which was scraped due to
little interest from the industry (Randy, thanks for pointing that out to
me).
I guess that in terms of goals, I aim for the same things. My belief is that
they were
simply ahead of their time and that nowadays distributed management and
interoperability 
between management systems is a much more burning issue. 

If we get to discuss this, I will try to raise the following issues:

Distributed Management Applications.

1. Are they at all interesting ?
	* Well, they sure are not trivial. The (default) concept of a simple
hierarchy 
         is not enough.
	* There are many different solutions around which sort of hints that
	  standardization may be worthwhile.

2. Why should we standardize?
	* Interoperability between management apps would be great for the
customer.
	  Distributed management apps already have some internal
communication protocol, so
	  why not use it for intra system communication ?
	* If we can agree on how disman apps look like we may be able to
identify new
	  common management objects that may simplify our lives. 

3. So what's next ?
	* We can ask companies to present how they solve distributed
management.
	  Possibly a panel with predefined questions, much like was done in
NANOG25 smart routing panel.
	  The participation in the panel may tell us if there is interest in
this issue.
	  
	* If we see interest we may revive the "Distributed Management
Framework" ID, or 
	  maybe just write a Best Current Practices document. Or do
nothing...

Anyway, I will bring this up in the agenda bashing today to see if we have
the time and interest to discuss this on Thursday. There's not a lot of time
until then, but your comments will be appreciated before or after.

Thanks, Gideon.