This is only a rough draft - Megan 04/20/92
Minutes of the Host Resources MIB BOF
San Diego, March 16, 1992
Steven Waldbusser, Chair
Agenda
Introduce charter and mailing list
Discuss goals
Identify resources
Plan for future work
Straw Proposal
The charter for the BOF was introduced:
_________________________________________________________________________
Host Resources MIB BOF
The purpose of the BOF will be to explore interest in consolidating
existing private vendor MIBs for SNMP that instrument computer hosts.
Such instrumentation represents non-network specific information such
as operational state and hardware and software configuration
information. This BOF will attempt to outline a plan for future
activity in this area.
Because the internet comprises a wide variety of workstation types,
discussion will not be confined to workstations that run Unix.
The goal of such an activity would be to improve interoperability in
the Internet environment by consolidating the large number of SNMP SMI
based objects have been and are being created by a number of vendors
in this area.
Some attempt will be made to identify those areas of existing
workstation instrumentation in which the desire for commonality is
most urgently felt.
_________________________________________________________________________
In addition, the mailing list was announced:
[email protected].
Please send add/remove requests to
[email protected].
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The group then began discussing the goals for this effort. Several
goals outlined in the charter were reiterated:
Goal #1: Improve interoperability by consolidating existing vendor MIBs.
Goal #2: Any objects should be common across platforms (e.g. Unix, PC, Mac).
Goal #3: Identify the most urgent areas and solve them quickly.
Goal #3, the desire for timeliness, was felt rather strongly by the group.
A discussion then ensued to attempt to identify the scope of this
process. It was noted that there are many problems to solve, some of
which are very complex, and others which are more general in nature
than instrumentation of hosts.
It was also unclear what comprises a host, but it was noted that
focusing on "personal computers" or "workstations" was most important
and makes it much easier to find commonality.
It was proposed that the most important instrumentation would cover:
operational state/performance
Hardware configuration
Software configuration
Furthermore, the focus would be on the following parts of a "host":
CPU, memory, disk, devices, and software (OS, drivers, applications).
The group agreed that a model should be prepared to support this work.
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The group then began identifying resources for this work. Many
existing MIBs (and related specs) were identified including:
Character MIB
Unix MIB (Marshall Rose)
Unix MIB (UTK)
Unix MIB (U. of Colorado)
Apple System MIB
Unix MIB (HP)
Unix MIB (Dec)
Microcom LanLord
Racal Interlan
Unix MIB (Posix)
Netware 3rd party Lan inventory products
In addition, in order to judge if there was sufficient interest in
moving forward with this work, a show of hands was conducted as to who
would participate in a Host Resource MIB Working Group, if formed. A
significant number of people (>30) indicated that they would
participate.
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The group achieved consensus on the following plans for the future:
Charter a working group (action item: Waldbusser)
Define a Model
Write a MIB
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In the remaining time, a straw proposal was outlined by Pete Grillo.
This proposal defined a model and a MIB that instrumented common
objects for "Desktop" hosts.
At the end of this presentation, our time was up and the meeting was
adjourned.
