Network Working Group                                   J. Schoenwaelder
Request for Comments: 3535               International University Bremen
Category: Informational                                         May 2003


         Overview of the 2002 IAB Network Management Workshop

Status of this Memo

  This memo provides information for the Internet community.  It does
  not specify an Internet standard of any kind.  Distribution of this
  memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

  Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2003).  All Rights Reserved.

Abstract

  This document provides an overview of a workshop held by the Internet
  Architecture Board (IAB) on Network Management.  The workshop was
  hosted by CNRI in Reston, VA, USA on June 4 thru June 6, 2002.  The
  goal of the workshop was to continue the important dialog started
  between network operators and protocol developers, and to guide the
  IETFs focus on future work regarding network management.  This report
  summarizes the discussions and lists the conclusions and
  recommendations to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
  community.























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Table of Contents

  1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  2
  2. Network Management Technologies  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
       2.1 SNMP / SMI / MIBs  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
       2.2 COPS-PR / SPPI / PIBs  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
       2.3 CIM / MOF / UML / PCIM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6
       2.4 CLI / TELNET / SSH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  7
       2.5 HTTP / HTML  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  8
       2.6 XML  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
  3. Operator Requirements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
  4. SNMP Framework Discussions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
  5. Consolidated Observations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
  6. Recommendations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
  7. Security Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
  8. Acknowledgments  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
  Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
  Appendix - Participants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
  Author's Address  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
  Full Copyright Statement  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

1. Introduction

  The IETF has started several activities in the operations and
  management area to develop technologies and standards that aim to
  help network operators manage their networks.  The main network
  management technologies currently being developed within the IETF
  are:

  o  The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) [RFC3410] was
     created in the late 1980s.  The initial version (SNMPv1) is widely
     deployed, while the latest version (SNMPv3), which addresses
     security requirements, is just beginning to gain significant
     deployment.

  o  The Common Information Model (CIM) [CIM], developed by the
     Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), has been extended in
     cooperation with the DMTF to describe high-level policies as rule
     sets (PCIM) [RFC3060].  Mappings of the CIM policy extensions to
     LDAP schemas have been defined and work continues to define
     specific schema extension for QoS and security policies.

  o  The Common Open Policy Service (COPS) [RFC2748] protocol has been
     extended to provision configuration information on devices (COPS-
     PR) [RFC3084].  Work is underway to define data definitions for
     specific services such as Differentiated Services (DiffServ).




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  During 2001, several meetings have been organized at various events
  (NANOG-22 May 2001, RIPE-40 October 2001, LISA-XV December 2001,
  IETF-52 December 2001) to start a direct dialog between network
  operators and protocol developers.  During these meetings, several
  operators have expressed their opinion that the developments in the
  IETF do not really address their requirements, especially for
  configuration management.  This naturally leads to the question of
  whether the IETF should refocus resources, and which strategic future
  activities in the operations and management area should be started.

  The Internet Architecture Board (IAB), on June 4 thru June 6, 2002,
  held an invitational workshop on network management.  The goal of the
  workshop was to continue the important dialog started between network
  operators and protocol developers, and to guide the IETFs focus on
  future work regarding network management.

  The workshop started with two breakout session to (a) identify a list
  of technologies relevant for network management together with their
  strengths and weaknesses, and to (b) identify the most important
  operator needs.  The results of these discussions are documented in
  Section 2 and Section 3.  During the following discussions, many more
  specific characteristics of the current SNMP framework were
  identified.  These discussions are documented in Section 4.  Section
  5 defines a combined feature list that was developed during the
  discussions following the breakout sessions.  Section 6 gives
  concrete recommendations to the IETF.

  The following text makes no explicit distinction between different
  versions of SNMP.  For the majority of the SNMP related statements,
  the protocol version is irrelevant.  Nevertheless, some statements
  are more applicable to SNMPv1/SNMPv2c environments, while other
  statements (especially those concerned with security) are more
  applicable to SNMPv3 environments.

2. Network Management Technologies

  During the breakout sessions, the protocol developers assembled a
  list of the various network management technologies that are
  available or under active development.  For each technology, a list
  of strong (+) and weak (-) points were identified.  There are also
  some characteristics which appear to be neutral (o).

  The list does not attempt to be complete.  Focus was given to IETF
  specific technologies (SNMP, COPS-PR, PCIM) and widely used
  proprietary technologies (CLI, HTTP/HTML, XML).  The existence of
  other generic management technologies (such as TL1, CORBA, CMIP/GDMO,





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  TMN) or specific management technologies for specific problem domains
  (such as RADIUS, DHCP, BGP, OSPF) were acknowledged, but were not the
  focus of discussion.

2.1 SNMP / SMI / MIBs

  The SNMP management technology was created in the late 1980s and has
  since been widely implemented and deployed in the Internet.  There is
  lots of implementational and operational experience, and the
  characteristics of the technology are thus well understood.

  +  SNMP works reasonably well for device monitoring.  The stateless
     nature of SNMP is useful for statistical and status polling.

  +  SNMP is widely deployed for basic monitoring.  Some core MIB
     modules, such as the IF-MIB [RFC2863], are implemented on most
     networking devices.

  +  There are many well defined proprietary MIB modules developed by
     network device vendors to support their management products.

  +  SNMP is an important data source for systems that do event
     correlation, alarm detection, and root cause analysis.

  o  SNMP requires applications to be useful.  SNMP was, from its early
     days, designed as a programmatic interface between management
     applications and devices.  As such, using SNMP without management
     applications or smart tools appears to be more complicated.

  o  Standardized MIB modules often lack writable MIB objects which can
     be used for configuration, and this leads to a situation where the
     interesting writable objects exist in proprietary MIB modules.

  -  There are scaling problems with regard to the number of objects in
     a device.  While SNMP provides reasonable performance for the
     retrieval of a small amount of data from many devices, it becomes
     rather slow when retrieving large amounts of data (such as routing
     tables) from a few devices.

  -  There is too little deployment of writable MIB modules.  While
     there are some notable exceptions in areas, such as cable modems
     where writable MIB modules are essential, it appears that router
     equipment is usually not fully configurable via SNMP.

  -  The SNMP transactional model and the protocol constraints make it
     more complex to implement MIBs, as compared to the implementation
     of commands of a command line interface interpreter.  A logical
     operation on a MIB can turn into a sequence of SNMP interactions



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     where the implementation has to maintain state until the operation
     is complete, or until a failure has been determined.  In case of a
     failure, a robust implementation must be smart enough to roll the
     device back into a consistent state.

  -  SNMP does not support easy retrieval and playback of
     configurations.  One part of the problem is that it is not easy to
     identify configuration objects.  Another part of the problem is
     that the naming system is very specific and physical device
     reconfigurations can thus break the capability to play back a
     previous configuration.

  -  There is often a semantic mismatch between the task-oriented view
     of the world usually preferred by operators and the data-centric
     view of the world provided by SNMP.  Mapping from a task-oriented
     view to the data-centric view often requires some non-trivial code
     on the management application side.

  -  Several standardized MIB modules lack a description of high-level
     procedures.  It is often not obvious from reading the MIB modules
     how certain high-level tasks are accomplished, which leads to
     several different ways to achieve the same goal, which increases
     costs and hinders interoperability.

  A more detailed discussion about the SNMP management technology can
  be found in Section 4.

2.2 COPS-PR / SPPI / PIBs

  The COPS protocol [RFC2748] was defined in the late 1990s to support
  policy control over QoS signaling protocols.  The COPS-PR extension
  allows provision policy information on devises.

  +  COPS-PR allows high-level transactions for single devices,
     including deleting one configuration and replacing it with
     another.

  +  COPS-PRs non-overlapping instance namespace normally ensures that
     no other manager can corrupt a specific configuration.  All
     transactions for a given instance namespace are required to be
     executed in-order.

  +  Both manager and device states are completely synchronized with
     one another at all times.  If there is a failure in communication,
     the state is resynchronized when the network is operating properly
     again and the device's network configuration is valid.





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  +  The atomicity of transactions is well-defined.  If there is any
     failure in a transaction, that specific failure is reported to the
     manager, and the local configuration is supposed to be
     automatically rolled-back to the state of the last "good"
     transaction.

  +  Capability reporting is part of the framework PIB which must be
     supported by COPS-PR implementations.  This allows management
     applications to adapt to the capabilities present on a device.

  +  The focus of COPS-PR is configuration, and the protocol has been
     optimized for this purpose (by using for example TCP as a
     transport mechanism).

  o  Only a single manager is allowed to have control, at any point in
     time, for a given subject category on a device.  (The subject
     category maps to a COPS Client-Type.)  This single manager
     assumption simplifies the protocol as it makes it easier to
     maintain shared state.

  o  Similar to SNMP, COPS-PR requires applications to be useful since
     it is also designed as a programmatic interface between management
     applications and devices.

  -  As of the time of the meeting, there are no standardized PIB
     modules.

  -  Compared to SNMP, there is not yet enough experience to understand
     the strong and weak aspects of the protocol in operational
     environments.

  -  COPS-PR does not support easy retrieval and playback of
     configurations.  The reasons are similar as for SNMP.

  -  The COPS-PR view of the world is data-centric, similar to SNMP's
     view of the world.  A mapping from the data-centric view to a
     task-oriented view and vice versa, has similar complexities as
     with SNMP.

2.3 CIM / MOF / UML / PCIM

  The development of the Common Information Model (CIM) [CIM] started
  in the DMTF in the mid 1990s.  The development follows a top-down
  approach where core classes are defined first and later extended to
  model specific services.  The DMTF and the IETF jointly developed
  policy extensions of the CIM, known as PCIM [RFC3060].





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  +  The CIM technology generally follows principles of object-
     orientation with full support of methods on data objects, which is
     not available in SNMP or COPS-PR.

  +  The MOF format allows representation of instances in a common
     format.  No such common format exists for SNMP or COPS-PR.  It is
     of course possible to store instances in the form of BER encoded
     ASN.1 sequences, but this is generally not suitable for human
     readability.

  +  There is support for a query facility which allows the locating of
     CIM objects.  However, the query language itself is not yet
     specified as part of the CIM standards.  Implementations currently
     use proprietary query languages, such as the Windows Management
     Instrumentation Query Language (WQL).

  +  The information modeling work in CIM is done by using Unified
     Modeling Language (UML) as a graphical notation.  This attracts
     people with a computer science background who have learned to use
     UML as part of their education.

  o  The main practical use of CIM schemas today seems to be the
     definition of data structures used internally by management
     systems.

  -  The CIM schemas have rather complex interrelationships that must
     be understood before one can reasonably extend the set of existing
     schemas.

  -  Interoperability between CIM implementations seems to be
     problematic compared to the number of interoperable SNMP
     implementations available today.

  -  So far, CIM schemas have seen limited implementation and usage as
     an interface between management systems and network devices.

2.4 CLI / TELNET / SSH

  Most devices have a builtin command line interface (CLI) for
  configuration and troubleshooting purposes.  Network access to the
  CLI has traditionally been through the TELNET protocol, while the SSH
  protocol is gaining momentum to address security issues associated
  with TELNET.  In the following, only CLIs that actually parse and
  execute commands are considered.  (Menu-oriented interfaces are
  difficult for automation and thus not relevant here.)

  +  Command line interfaces are generally task-oriented, which make
     them easier to use for human operators.



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  +  A saved sequence of textual commands can easily be replayed.
     Simple substitutions can be made with arbitrary text processing
     tools.

  +  It is usually necessary to learn at least parts of the command
     line interface of new devices in order to create the initial
     configuration.  Once people have learned (parts of) the command
     line interface, it is natural for them to use the same interface
     and abstractions for automating configuration changes.

  +  A command line interface does not require any special purpose
     applications (telnet and ssh are readily available on most systems
     today).

  +  Most command line interfaces provide context sensitive help that
     reduces the learning curve.

  -  Some command line interfaces lack a common data model.  It is very
     well possible that the same command on different devices, even
     from the same vendor, behaves differently.

  -  The command line interface is primarily targeted to humans which
     can adapt to minor syntax and format changes easily.  Using
     command line interfaces as a programmatic interface is troublesome
     because of parsing complexities.

  -  Command line interfaces often lack proper version control for the
     syntax and the semantics.  It is therefore time consuming and
     error prone to maintain programs or scripts that interface with
     different versions of a command line interface.

  -  Since command line interfaces are proprietary, they can not be
     used efficiently to automate processes in an environment with a
     heterogenous set of devices.

  -  The access control facilities, if present at all, are often ad-hoc
     and sometimes insufficient.

2.5 HTTP / HTML

  Many devices have an embedded web server which can be used to
  configure the device and to obtain status information.  The commonly
  used protocol is HTTP, and information is rendered in HTML.  Some
  devices also expect that clients have facilities such as Java or Java
  Script.

  +  Embedded web servers for configuration are end-user friendly and
     solution oriented.



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  +  Embedded web servers are suitable for configuring consumer devices
     by inexperienced users.

  +  Web server configuration is widely deployed, especially in boxes
     targeted to the consumer market.

  +  There is no need for specialized applications to use embedded web
     servers since web browsers are commonly available today.

  -  Embedded web servers are management application hostile.  Parsing
     HTML pages to extract useful information is extremely painful.

  -  Replay of configuration is often problematic, either because the
     web pages rely on some active content or because different
     versions of the same device use different ways to interact with
     the user.

  -  The access control facilities, if present at all, are often ad-hoc
     and sometimes insufficient.

2.6 XML

  In the late 1990's, some vendors started to use the Extensible Markup
  Language (XML) [XML] for describing device configurations and for
  protocols that can be used to retrieve and manipulate XML formatted
  configurations.

  +  XML is a machine readable format which is easy to process and
     there are many good off the shelf tools available.

  +  XML allows the description of structured data of almost arbitrary
     complexity.

  +  The basic syntax rules behind XML are relatively easy to learn.

  +  XML provides a document-oriented view of configuration data
     (similar to many proprietary configuration file formats).

  +  XML has a robust schema language XSD [XSD] for which many good off
     the shelf tools exist.

  o  XML alone is just syntax.  XML schemas must be carefully designed
     to make XML truly useful as a data exchange format.








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  -  XML is rather verbose.  This either increases the bandwidth
     required to move management information around (which is an issue
     in e.g., wireless or asymmetric cable networks) or it requires
     that the systems involved have the processing power to do on the
     fly compression/decompression.

  -  There is a lack of commonly accepted standardized management
     specific XML schemas.

3. Operator Requirements

  During the breakout session, the operators were asked to identify
  needs that have not been sufficiently addressed.  The results
  produced during the breakout session were later discussed and
  resulted in the following list of operator requirements.

  1.  Ease of use is a key requirement for any network management
      technology from the operators point of view.

  2.  It is necessary to make a clear distinction between configuration
      data, data that describes operational state and statistics.  Some
      devices make it very hard to determine which parameters were
      administratively configured and which were obtained via other
      mechanisms such as routing protocols.

  3.  It is required to be able to fetch separately configuration data,
      operational state data, and statistics from devices, and to be
      able to compare these between devices.

  4.  It is necessary to enable operators to concentrate on the
      configuration of the network as a whole rather than individual
      devices.

  5.  Support for configuration transactions across a number of devices
      would significantly simplify network configuration management.

  6.  Given configuration A and configuration B, it should be possible
      to generate the operations necessary to get from A to B with
      minimal state changes and effects on network and systems.  It is
      important to minimize the impact caused by configuration changes.

  7.  A mechanism to dump and restore configurations is a primitive
      operation needed by operators.  Standards for pulling and pushing
      configurations from/to devices are desirable.







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  8.  It must be easy to do consistency checks of configurations over
      time and between the ends of a link in order to determine the
      changes between two configurations and whether those
      configurations are consistent.

  9.  Network wide configurations are typically stored in central
      master databases and transformed into formats that can be pushed
      to devices, either by generating sequences of CLI commands or
      complete configuration files that are pushed to devices.  There
      is no common database schema for network configuration, although
      the models used by various operators are probably very similar.
      It is desirable to extract, document, and standardize the common
      parts of these network wide configuration database schemas.

  10. It is highly desirable that text processing tools such as diff,
      and version management tools such as RCS or CVS, can be used to
      process configurations, which implies that devices should not
      arbitrarily reorder data such as access control lists.

  11. The granularity of access control needed on management interfaces
      needs to match operational needs.  Typical requirements are a
      role-based access control model and the principle of least
      privilege, where a user can be given only the minimum access
      necessary to perform a required task.

  12. It must be possible to do consistency checks of access control
      lists across devices.

  13. It is important to distinguish between the distribution of
      configurations and the activation of a certain configuration.
      Devices should be able to hold multiple configurations.

  14. SNMP access control is data-oriented, while CLI access control is
      usually command (task) oriented.  Depending on the management
      function, sometimes data-oriented or task-oriented access control
      makes more sense.  As such, it is a requirement to support both
      data-oriented and task-oriented access control.

  So far, there is no published document that clearly defines the
  requirements of the operators.











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4. SNMP Framework Discussions

  During the discussions, many properties of the SNMP framework were
  identified.

  1.  It is usually not possible to retrieve complete device
      configurations via SNMP so that they can be compared with
      previous configurations or checked for consistency across
      devices.  There is usually only incomplete coverage of device
      features via the SNMP interface, and there is a lack of
      differentiation between configuration data and operational state
      data for many features.

  2.  The quality of SNMP instrumentations is sometimes disappointing.
      SNMP access sometimes crashes systems or returns wrong data.

  3.  MIB modules and their implementations are not available in a
      timely manner (sometimes MIB modules lag years behind) which
      forces users to use the CLI.

  4.  Operators view current SNMP programming/scripting interfaces as
      being too low-level and thus too time consuming and inconvenient
      for practical use.

  5.  Lexicographic ordering is sometimes artificial with regard to
      internal data structures and causes either significant runtime
      overhead, or increases implementation costs or implementation
      delay or both.

  6.  Poor performance for bulk data transfers.  The typical examples
      are routing tables.

  7.  Poor performance on query operations that were not anticipated
      during the MIB design.  A typical example is the following query:
      Which outgoing interface is being used for a specific destination
      address?

  8.  The SNMP credentials and key management are considered complex,
      especially since they do not integrate well with other existing
      credential and key management systems.

  9.  The SMI language is hard to deal with and not very practical.

  10. MIB modules are often over-engineered in the sense that they
      contain lots of variables that operators do not look at.






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  11. SNMP traps are used to track state changes but often syslog
      messages are considered more useful since they usually contain
      more information to describe the problem.  SNMP traps usually
      require subsequent get operations to figure out what the trap
      really means.

  12. Device manufacturers find SNMP instrumentations inherently
      difficult to implement, especially with complex table indexing
      schemes and table interrelationships.

  13. MIB modules often lack a description of how the various objects
      can be used to achieve certain management functions.  (MIB
      modules can often be characterized as a list of ingredients
      without a recipe.)

  14. The lack of structured types and various RPC interactions
      (methods) make MIB modules much more complex to design and
      implement.

  15. The lack of query and aggregation capabilities (reduction of
      data) causes efficiency and scalability problems.

  16. The SNMP protocol was simplified in terms of the number of
      protocol operations and resource requirements on managed devices.
      It was not simplified in terms of usability by network operators
      or instrumentation implementors.

  17. There is a semantic mismatch between the low-level data-oriented
      abstraction level of MIB modules and the task-oriented
      abstraction level desired by network operators.  Bridging the gap
      with tools is in principle possible, but in general it is
      expensive as it requires some serious development and programming
      efforts.

  18. SNMP seems to work reasonably well for small devices which have a
      limited number of managed objects and where end-user management
      applications are shipped by the vendor.  For more complex
      devices, SNMP becomes too expensive and too hard to use.

  19. There is a disincentive for vendors to implement SNMP equivalent
      MIB modules for all their CLI commands because they do not see a
      valued proposition.  This undermines the value of third party
      standard SNMP solutions.

  20. Rapid feature development is in general not compatible with the
      standardization of the configuration interface.





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5. Consolidated Observations

  1.  Programmatic interfaces have to provide full coverage otherwise
      they will not be used by network operators since they have to
      revert to CLIs anyway.

  2.  Operators perceive that equipment vendors do not implement MIB
      modules in a timely manner.  Neither read-only nor read-write MIB
      modules are available on time today.

  3.  The attendees perceive that right now it is too hard to implement
      useful MIB modules within network equipment.

  4.  Because of the previous items, SNMP is not widely used today for
      network device configuration, although there are notable
      exceptions.

  5.  It is necessary to clearly distinguish between configuration data
      and operational data.

  6.  It would be nice to have a single data definition language for
      all programmatic interfaces (in case there happen to be multiple
      programmatic interfaces).

  7.  In general, there is a lack of input from the enterprise network
      space.  Those enterprises who provided input tend to operate
      their networks like network operators.

  8.  It is required to be able to dump and reload a device
      configuration in a textual format in a standard manner across
      multiple vendors and device types.

  9.  It is desirable to have a mechanism to distribute configurations
      to devices under transactional constraints.

  10. Eliminating SNMP altogether is not an option.

  11. Robust access control is needed.  In addition, it is desirable to
      be able to enable/disable individual MIB modules actually
      implemented on a device.

  12. Textual configuration files should be able to contain
      international characters.  Human-readable strings should utilize
      the least-bad internationalized character set and encoding, which
      this year almost certainly means UTF-8.  Protocol elements should
      be in case insensitive ASCII.





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  13. The deployed tools for event/alarm correlation, root cause
      analysis and logging are not sufficient.

  14. There is a need to support a human interface and a programmatic
      interface.

  15. The internal method routines for both interfaces should be the
      same to ensure that data exchanged between these two interfaces
      is always consistent.

  16. The implementation costs have to be low on devices.

  17. The implementation costs have to be low on managers.

  18. The specification costs for data models have to be low.

  19. Standardization costs for data models have to be low.

  20. There should be a single data modeling language with a human
      friendly syntax.

  21. The data modeling language must support compound data types.

  22. There is a need for data aggregation capabilities on the devices.

  23. There should be a common data interchange format for instance
      data that allows easy post-processing and analysis.

  24. There is a need for a common data exchange format with single and
      multi-system transactions (which implies rollback across devices
      in error situations).

  25. There is a need to reduce the semantic mismatch between current
      data models and the primitives used by operators.

  26. It should be possible to perform operations on selected subsets
      of management data.

  27. It is necessary to discover the capabilities of devices.

  28. There is a need for a secure transport, authentication, identity,
      and access control which integrates well with existing key and
      credential management infrastructure.

  29. It must be possible to define task oriented views and access
      control rules.





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  30. The complete configuration of a device should be doable with a
      single protocol.

  31. A configuration protocol must be efficient and reliable and it
      must scale in the number of transactions and devices.

  32. Devices must be able to support minimally interruptive
      configuration deltas.

  33. A solution must support function call semantics (methods) to
      implement functions, such as a longest prefix match on a routing
      table.

6. Recommendations

  1.  The workshop recommends that the IETF stop forcing working groups
      to provide writable MIB modules.  It should be the decision of
      the working group whether they want to provide writable objects
      or not.

  2.  The workshop recommends that a group be formed to investigate why
      current MIB modules do not contain all the objects needed by
      operators to monitor their networks.

  3.  The workshop recommends that a group be formed to investigate why
      the current SNMP protocol does not satisfy all the monitoring
      requirements of operators.

  4.  The workshop recommends, with strong consensus from both protocol
      developers and operators, that the IETF focus resources on the
      standardization of configuration management mechanisms.

  5.  The workshop recommends, with strong consensus from the operators
      and rough consensus from the protocol developers, that the
      IETF/IRTF should spend resources on the development and
      standardization of XML-based device configuration and management
      technologies (such as common XML configuration schemas, exchange
      protocols and so on).

  6.  The workshop recommends, with strong consensus from the operators
      and rough consensus from the protocol developers, that the
      IETF/IRTF should not spend resources on developing HTML-based or
      HTTP-based methods for configuration management.








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  7.  The workshop recommends, with rough consensus from the operators
      and strong consensus from the protocol developers, that the IETF
      should continue to spend resources on the evolution of the
      SMI/SPPI data definition languages as being done in the SMIng
      working group.

  8.  The workshop recommends, with split consensus from the operators
      and rough consensus from the protocol developers, that the IETF
      should spend resources on fixing the MIB development and
      standardization process.

  The workshop also discussed the following items and achieved rough
  consensus, but did not make a recommendation.

  1.  The workshop had split consensus from the operators and rough
      consensus from the protocol developers, that the IETF should not
      focus resources on CIM extensions.

  2.  The workshop had rough consensus from the protocol developers
      that the IETF should not spend resources on COPS-PR development.
      So far, the operators have only very limited experience with
      COPS-PR.  In general, however, they felt that further development
      of COPS-PR might be a waste of resources as they assume that
      COPS-PR does not really address their requirements.

  3.  The workshop had rough consensus from the protocol developers
      that the IETF should not spend resources on SPPI PIB definitions.
      The operators had rough consensus that they do not care about
      SPPI PIBs.

7. Security Considerations

  This document is a report of an IAB Network Management workshop.  As
  such, it does not have any direct security implications for the
  Internet.

8. Acknowledgments

  The editor would like to thank Dave Durham, Simon Leinen and John
  Schnizlein for taking detailed minutes during the workshop.











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Normative References

  [RFC3410]  Case, J., Mundy, R., Partain, D. and B. Stewart,
             "Introduction and Applicability Statements for Internet-
             Standard Management Framework", RFC 3410, December 2002.

  [CIM]      Distributed Management Task Force, "Common Information
             Model (CIM) Specification Version 2.2", DSP 0004, June
             1999.

  [RFC3060]  Moore, B., Ellesson, E., Strassner, J. and A. Westerinen,
             "Policy Core Information Model -- Version 1
             Specification", RFC 3060, February 2001.

  [RFC2748]  Durham, D., Boyle, J., Cohen, R., Herzog, S., Rajan, R.
             and A. Sastry, "The COPS (Common Open Policy Service)
             Protocol", RFC 2748, January 2000.

  [RFC3084]  Chan, K., Seligson, J., Durham, D., Gai, S., McCloghrie,
             K., Herzog, S., Reichmeyer, F., Yavatkar, R. and A. Smith,
             "COPS Usage for Policy Provisioning (COPS-PR)", RFC 3084,
             March 2001.

  [XML]      Bray, T., Paoli, J. and C. Sperberg-McQueen, "Extensible
             Markup Language (XML) 1.0", W3C Recommendation, February
             1998.

Informative References

  [RFC2863]  McCloghrie, K. and F. Kastenholz, "The Interfaces Group
             MIB", RFC 2863, June 2000.

  [XSD]      David, D., "XML Schema Part 0: Primer", W3C
             Recommendation, May 2001.

















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Appendix - Participants

  Ran Atkinson          Extreme Networks
  Rob Austein           InterNetShare
  Andy Bierman          Cisco Systems
  Steve Bellovin        AT&T
  Randy Bush            AT&T
  Leslie Daigle         VeriSign
  David Durham          Intel
  Vijay Gill
  Wes Hardaker          Network Associates Laboratories
  Ed Kern
  Simon Leinen          Switch
  Ken Lindahl           University of California Berkeley
  David Partain         Ericsson
  Andrew Partan         UUnet/Verio/MFN
  Vern Paxson           ICIR
  Aiko Pras             Univeristy of Twente
  Randy Presuhn         BMC Software
  Juergen Schoenwaelder University of Osnabrueck
  John Schnizlein       Cisco Systems
  Mike St. Johns
  Ruediger Volk         Deutsche Telekom
  Steve Waldbusser
  Margaret Wassermann   Windriver
  Glen Waters           Nortel Networks
  Bert Wijnen           Lucent

Author's Address

  Comments should be submitted to the <[email protected]> mailing
  list.

  Juergen Schoenwaelder
  International University Bremen
  P.O. Box 750 561
  28725 Bremen
  Germany

  Phone: +49 421 200 3587
  EMail: [email protected]










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Full Copyright Statement

  Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2003).  All Rights Reserved.

  This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
  others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
  or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published
  and distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any
  kind, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
  included on all such copies and derivative works.  However, this
  document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
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  The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
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  This document and the information contained herein is provided on an
  "AS IS" basis and THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND THE INTERNET ENGINEERING
  TASK FORCE DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING
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  HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
  MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Acknowledgement

  Funding for the RFC Editor function is currently provided by the
  Internet Society.



















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