Subject: Re: [MIB-DOCTORS] YANG life-cycle issues - lessons from SNMP?

From: Randy Presuhn <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2014 23:00:27 -0700 (GMT-07:00)

Hi -

>From: Andy Bierman <[email-masked]>
>Sent: Apr 4, 2014 4:26 PM
>To: Randy Presuhn <[email-masked]>
>Cc: YANG Doctors <[email-masked]>, "MIB Doctors (E-mail)" <[email-masked]>
>Subject: Re: [MIB-DOCTORS] YANG life-cycle issues - lessons from SNMP?
...
>How many mandatory objects are there in SNMP? none?

Look at the RowStatus for a table, and it will tell you exactly
what the mandatory objects are.

>How hard is it for a client to receive some monitoring info
>it doesn't know or care about?  Monitoring is really easy
>compared to configuration.

I think there's a pitfall to relying overmuch on this
kind of analogy.  Yes, a monitor will will skip over
information it doesn't understand, but any semi-intelligent
monitor won't bother asking for stuff it knows it won't
understand.  The fact that monitors have to spend so
much energy coping with extraneous stuff is just an
artifact of SNMP's bizarre GetNext and GetBulk operators.

So what do I think one should do with unintelligible
configuration information?  One can live dangerously
and ignore it, or behave more prudently and complain.

I'd argue that an attempt to configure a system with
unsupported configuration data is prima facie evidence
that the configuration is in error, and only potentially
makes sense when provisioning components whose software
has not yet been delivered.

Randy

---

From: Andy Bierman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 5 Apr 2014 08:17:00 -0700

On Fri, Apr 4, 2014 at 11:00 PM, Randy Presuhn <[email-masked]
> wrote:

> has not yet been delivered.

In theory old managers can keep doing their 'old' work
and new managers support the new functionality.
Since configuration has been done via ad-hoc CLI for
so many years, it is hard to say how closely these rules
have been followed, or how much they matter.

Randy
Andy