2.4.3 Distributed Management (disman)

NOTE: This charter is a snapshot of the 45th IETF Meeting in Oslo, Norway. It may now be out-of-date. Last Modified: 27-May-99

Chair(s):

Randy Presuhn <rpresuhn@bmc.com>

Operations and Management Area Director(s):

Randy Bush <randy@psg.com>
Bert Wijnen <wijnen@vnet.ibm.com>

Operations and Management Area Advisor:

Bert Wijnen <wijnen@vnet.ibm.com>

Technical Advisor(s):

Bob Stewart <bstewart@cisco.com>

Mailing Lists:

General Discussion:disman@dorothy.bmc.com
To Subscribe: disman-request@dorothy.bmc.com
In Body: subscribe disman your_email_address
Archive: ftp://ftp.peer.com/pub/disman/archives

Description of Working Group:

The Distributed Management Working Group is chartered to define an initial set of managed objects for specific distributed network management applications and a framework in which these applications and others can be consistently developed and deployed. A distributed network manager is an applicaton that acts in a manager role to perform management functions and in an agent role so that it can be remotely controlled and observed.

Distributed network management is widely recognized as a requirement for dealing with today's growing internets. A manager application is a good candidate for distribution if it requires minimal user interaction, it would potentially consume a significant amount of network resources due to frequent polling or large data retrieval, or it requires close association with the device(s) being managed.

The working group will limit its work to distributed network management applications where the main communication mechanism for monitoring and control is SNMP. Future work (and other working groups) may be chartered to investigate other distribution techniques such as CORBA or HTTP. The objects defined by the working group will be consistent with the SNMP framework. The working group will especially keep security considerations in mind when defining the interface to distributed management.

The working group will complete these tasks:

Define a Script MIB

Define a Scheduling MIB

Define a Threshold Monitoring MIB

The working group will consider existing definitions, including:

o RFC1451, The Manager to Manager MIB which was being considered by the SNMPv2 working group

o the RMON working group's work in this area

o the SNMP Mid-Level-Manager MIB which is now an expired Internet-Draft

o the work of the Application MIB working group

It is recognized that the scope of this working group is narrow relative to the potential in the area of distributed network management. This is intentional in order to increase the likelihood of producing useful, quality specifications in a timely manner. However, we will keep in mind and account for potential related or future work when developing the framework including:

o Event and alarm logging and distribution

o Historical data collection/summarization

o Topology discovery

Goals and Milestones:

Done

  

Post Internet-Draft for Threshold Monitoring MIB.

Done

  

Meet at the Montreal IETF meeting to discuss charter and review the Threshold Monitoring MIB Internet-Draft.

Done

  

Post Internet-Draft for Framework document.

Done

  

Post Internet-Draft for Script MIB.

Done

  

Submit final version of Threshold Monitor MIB Internet-Draft for consideration as a Proposed Standard. Submit updated versions of Internet-Drafts for Script MIB.

Done

  

Meet at the IETF meeting to discuss Internet-Drafts and issues that come up on the mailing list.

Done

  

Submit final versions of Internet-Drafts for Script MIB and Schedule MIB document for consideration as Proposed Standards.

Done

  

Agree on charter revisions for future work.

May 99

  

Submit final versions of Internet-Drafts for Expression, Event and Notification MIB documents for consideration as Proposed Standards.

Jun 99

  

Submit final version of Internet-Draft for Remote Ping, Traceroute, and Lookup Operations Using SMIv2

Jul 99

  

Meeting in Oslo to discuss implementation and deployment experience with Schedule and Script mibs, identify any updates needed to these documents.

Nov 99

  

Submit updated Script and Schedule MIBs for consideration as Draft Standards.

Internet-Drafts:

Request For Comments:

RFC

Status

Title

 

RFC2591

PS

Definitions of Managed Objects for Scheduling Management Operations

RFC2592

PS

Definitions of Managed Objects for the Delegation of Management Scripts

Current Meeting Report

Oslo, Norway, July 14, 1999
Chair: Randy Presuhn
Reported by: Rob Frye
Charter: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/disman-charter.html

Agenda:
1. Administrative matters
2. Status of Current Internet-Drafts
3. Implementation & Interoperability Experience
4. Issues with current Drafts and RFCs
5. Strategy for Updates to RFCs
6. Time allotted for Technical Presentations (none)
7. Wrap-up

The DISMAN working group met from 09:00 to 11:30 on 1999-07-14 at the 45th IETF meeting in Oslo, Norway. Rob Frye recorded the meeting minutes. Approximately 75 people attended the meeting. Signup sheets were distributed, and no agenda changes were proposed. Several people indicated they had read one or more of the relevant drafts.

There are currently 4 Internet Drafts. Of these, 3 drafts are in working group last call: Event MIB (draft-ietf-disman-event-mib-07.txt), Distributed Management Expression MIB (draft-ietf-disman-express-mib-09.txt), and Notification Log MIB (draft-ietf-disman-notif-log-mib-10.txt). These are expected to be forwarded to the Operations and Management AD the week of July 19. The 9 open issues for the other Draft, "Definitions of Managed Objects for Remote Ping, Traceroute, and Lookup Operations Using SMIv2" ("Remops", draft-ietf-disman-remops-mib-05.txt) were discussed, arriving at consensus for most of the issues. Issues 1 & 3 were skipped over as being duplicated with other issues, and issues 5-9 were already closed. Issue 2 regarding the use of Traceroute and ICMP Echo pings was discussed with no final conclusion, to be further discussed on the list, and issue 4 discussion regarding the use of DNS names reached the conclusion that no change was needed to the drafts.

Randy Presuhn will update the issues list, and a new version of the draft will be circulated by Ken White for WG last-call comments approximately August 2, with plans to provide to the AD and IESG about August 9.

One technical question was raised as to whether or not Remops could suggest the use of settings of the TOS byte in traceroute packets. A "pingCtlTos" definition for this option has been submitted to the mailing list and will be discussed on the list. Another question was raised about the use of a C-language struct ("hostent" in section 3.3.3) which is used as example to explain the workings of the lookupResultsTable; no change is planned as a result of the discussion.

Implementation and interoperability experiences were discussed. Some WG members have had experience with the Schedule MIB (RFC 2591) and Script MIB (RFC 2592) although some interoperation experience is still needed to advance the RFCs. No experience was noted about RFC 2593 (Script MIB Extensibility). There was no strong consensus about advancing the Schedule MIB, and it was agreed that the Script MIB needed further work to define auto-start, restartable and always-running scripts, and resolve integer-versus-name index issues for the smLangTable, smExtnTable and smScriptTable tables. Auto-start and restartable options discussed were:

1. find or define a bit in smLaunchTable to define autostart
2. bind script startup to boot event (receipt of event notification), possibly generalizing with a new MIB to bind script startups to any defined SNMP event
3. unify all event sources in a generic event binding MIB, where event sources may be triggers, schedulers, notifications, etc. -- it was agreed that the current Script MIB does not have the mechanisms to define such triggers.

These and any other issues are to be futher investigated on the WG list.

Slides

None received.