> >Are you all interested in starting an open source project around this?
> I don't know about anybody else, but I certainly am. I think that
> such a "network database" would then become a platform upon which
> much else could and would be built; like you said, though, it's
> currently the core missing piece.
Coming from network management development for ATM switches and VoIP
boxes, I'd like to share an idea that I'm going to implement sooner or
later and would like to see approved as "not wrong":
"The semantics of a network model should be defined by the network elements!"
The reason is rather simple:
Either a network management system needs an awful amount of information
about a network that it should work on (and this would either need to
be standardized into the last little detail or manually entered by
admins), or the network must be able to provide information about itself.
Currently I'm merely waiting for a standard to support that approach,
or a few global players to start using something like it.
Examples:
a) the stone-age SNMP approach to this: a private MIB is generated from
within the sources of device-firmware and distributed by a device to
its managers to be compiled and give the admin access to
configuration/accounting/security/fault/performance information that
exceeds the public MIBs.
[no semantics in this approach other than the textual decriptions of
Managed Objects]
b) in the XML-world the managed entity would be capable of producing a
Schema for it's management data (Preferrably precompiled, but on
strong, complicated network elements it may be dynamically generated).
I hoped that Netconf or CIM would sooner or later define this.
Transportation using the Netconf drafts is fine, though.
(Yes, NetML could be a syntax to use for this)
c) web based management is already quite near this approach, (because
it keeps much of the intelligence for device control inside of the
devices) but it has far too many proprietary variants, and automating
it is messy.
(maybe WBEM could help here, but I didn't look into that so far)
In other words: I believe that trying to build management software that
tries to manage everything is fine for today's applications, but for the
future it would be easier to handle this by offloading information from
that management software to the devices/elements/CPE, using a standardized
approach.
Can anybody comment if this is completely stupid or has been done already
or may be a useful approach?
Thanks,
Gio
Epygi Labs DE GmbH - Georg 'Gio' Magschok
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