Subject: disman applications

From: Gideon Stupp <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 2002 21:53:59 +0200

Hi all,

Sorry for not positing this earlier. Had some problems with my VPN.

Anyway, on Thursday  I hope to have a short discussion 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 see 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 like the "Distributed Management Framework" ID
written by Bierman et  al. in 1998, which was scraped due to little interest
(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 will get to this, I will try to talk about the 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 (framework
?). 

3. So what's next ?
	* We can ask people 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.
	  
	* If we see interest we may revive the "Distributed Management
Framework" ID, or 
	  maybe just write a Best Current Practices document. Or do
nothing...

Your comments will be appreciated.

Thanks, Gideon.