Subject: [OPS-AREA] FW: I-D ACTION:draft-jinxiang-operations-and-management-ngi-00.txt

From: "David Harrington" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2008 16:31:41 -0500

Hi,

I am not sure what the correct forum is for commenting on this draft.
The draft presents itself as a BCP, but I do not believe it qualifies
for BCP status. I do not mean to be hard on the author, but I think
this document really is more an academic research paper, and not ready
to be published as an RFC of any status.

First, the draft title is "based on NGI" but I saw nothing specific to
NGI in the draft.

Second, the draft references SNMPv1 (RFC1157), and talks about using
Get-Next, but has no consideration of whether the proposed BCP also
covers SNMPv3. There are a number of mentions of the "Gauge Counter
Type", but SNMP has no "Gauge Counter Type"; it has gauges and
counters with different properties. It appears the author does not
understand the current state and terminology of SNMP standards.

Third, this draft is really about optimizing an application's approach
to polling. One proposal is to implement an adaptive polling strategy.
A second proposal is to implement a prefetch approach (cacheing).  

Some existing NMS applications already implement adaptive polling, and
I am not sure this paper reflects or adds anything to the current
practices used by those applications. Since adaptive polling is
implementation-dependent, I am not convinced this is work that needs
to be standardized, and I am not aware that the application vendors
seek to standardize their proprietary algorithms for adaptive polling.

The prefetch approach is about sorting repetitive requests by the
dynamism of the objects being fetched, aggregating varbinds with
similar timeliness properties into combined "group" requests, and
cacheing the information. The document also discusses group based on
self-adaptive algorithms. Some existing NMS applications already
implement time-based caching. Rearranging varbind requests can be
tricky, for example when requests include objects that serve as
discontinuity indicators for other objects in the varbind list. I do
not see adequate discussion of such issues in this document.

In my experience, the best current practice for dealing with large
networks is to use distributed managers to poll different sections of
the network, and to make the distributed information available as
needed to operators.

I had great difficulty following this document, partly because the
English was not as clear as needed to be effective, but also because
the discussion of SNMP seemed to reveal a limited understanding of the
current stat eof SNMP, and an effort to represent the information in
quasi-mathematical formulae sometimes made it difficult to understand
what was being proposed.

I do not feel this paper should be published as a BCP. I question
whether it should be published as an RFC at all, since it could be
misleading to readers that the IETF in any way approves the document.

I suggest that the authors might consider taking this discussion to
the Network Management Research Group of the IRTF, where SNMP
measurement and analysis is being discussed.  

David Harrington
[email-masked]
[email-masked]
[email-masked]

IETF MIB Doctor
co-chair of the now-closed SNMPv3 WG

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: Monday, December 31, 2007 12:15 PM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: I-D
ACTION:draft-jinxiang-operations-and-management-ngi-00.txt 

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts 
directories.

	Title		: Retriving MIB Information based on NGI  
	Author(s)	: J. Zhang, et al.
	Filename	:
draft-jinxiang-operations-and-management-ngi-00.txt
	Pages		: 15
	Date		: 2007-12-31
	
   An important task of network management is to collect and analyze 
   MIB information  of various object combinations based on the
   Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) with proper frequency.
   The purpose of this document is to propose two algorithms to
retrieve
   MIB information  for a large (up to exponential) number of managed 
   objects using SNMP in Next Generation Internet (NGI). 

A URL for this Internet-Draft is:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-jinxiang-operations-and-mana
gement-ngi-00.txt

To remove yourself from the I-D Announcement list, send a message to 
[email-masked] with the word unsubscribe in the body of

the message. 
You can also visit https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/I-D-announce

to change your subscription settings.

Internet-Drafts are also available by anonymous FTP. Login with the 
username "anonymous" and a password of your e-mail address. After 
logging in, type "cd internet-drafts" and then 
"get draft-jinxiang-operations-and-management-ngi-00.txt".

A list of Internet-Drafts directories can be found in
http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html 
or ftp://ftp.ietf.org/ietf/1shadow-sites.txt

Internet-Drafts can also be obtained by e-mail.

Send a message to:
	[email-masked].
In the body type:
	"FILE
/internet-drafts/draft-jinxiang-operations-and-management-ngi-00.txt".
	
NOTE:	The mail server at ietf.org can return the document in
	MIME-encoded form by using the "mpack" utility.  To use this
	feature, insert the command "ENCODING mime" before the "FILE"
	command.  To decode the response(s), you will need "munpack"
or
	a MIME-compliant mail reader.  Different MIME-compliant mail
readers
	exhibit different behavior, especially when dealing with
	"multipart" MIME messages (i.e. documents which have been
split
	up into multiple messages), so check your local documentation
on
	how to manipulate these messages.

Below is the data which will enable a MIME compliant mail reader
implementation to automatically retrieve the ASCII version of the
Internet-Draft.
ENCODING mime
FILE /internet-drafts/draft-jinxiang-operations-and-management-ngi-00.txt
_______________________________________________
OPS-AREA mailing list
[email-masked]
http://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ops-area