Subject: snmpconf Policy Processing Questions

From: Jon Saperia <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 05 Jul 2000 11:16:20 -0400

The second of three I promised.
/jon
Policy Processing Questions:

1. An agent that gets a bad policy should do the right thing where right
thing is to be defined.

2. Expression examples would be helpful: can we get (a+b) and ((a+B)*c) or
a+(bxc) or (A+B)xc?

3. How do we handle syntax errors?

4. How do we handle run time exceptions -How many errors are OK within a
policy?

5. How to deal with partial failures - notification of policy in trouble?

6. Types of exceptions - e.g. divide by zero or parts of the system
failures. Token and run time exceptions?

7. What is the role of the manager in evaluating expressions?

8. What type of error reporting from the agent is required.
    -agent validation functions and what type of errors
    -Policy testing/verification prior to putting into service

9. Is it a requirement that we support UTF8 in our accessor functions?

10. Do we want to feed values from filter in to the policy action?
    - Intermediate values?
    - After we get a return value do we want to fire an action, and if so
      with a parameter other than true false, passing arguments.

11. Is the constraint of left and right useful?

12. Do we need both action and filter or would one do? What are the
interactions allowed?

13. Need to address the question of the syntax of an identifier - what is
the proper syntax of ifType.$1 - what is the structure including
wildcarding?

14. What are the implications of wildcarding and implications in both
directions in the role tables.

15. How big should an expression be allowed to be?

16. Not possible to download all policies everywhere. Must subset what to
send so must handle two errors: download superfluous policy, fail to
download needed policy: Type I and Type II - false positives

17. How do we detect and how to standardize error handling.

18. Estimated number of policies that we need to handle - we need the
architecture to be able to scale up and down - what attributes are required
to meet this goal?

19.Where to start the policy evaluation?

20. How often to evaluate the filter and when?

21. Is iterator is outside or inside the filter statement?

22. Is one iterater sufficient or do we need nested iterators.

23. How do we select instances?

24. What do we want for role - iteraters how many where.

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