Hi Les, > Using the protocol to send what is best described as some subset of a PICS > means that we propose to use the IGP flooding mechanism to send static > information which the protocol itself cannot (and should not) use in its > operation. This consumes space, bandwidth, gets periodically refreshed > unnecessarily, and now a complete copy of the information from every node > resides on every router in the network when it is only needed by an “NMS”. It > would be hard to come up with a better example of “IGP isn’t a dump truck” > than this.
If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. > If there is a belief that we can severely limit the amount of information > that is sent/node, I’d have to say that I am skeptical. Once we allow this > into the protocol, I don’t see any basis on which to separate what is allowed > and what is disallowed. It would not be unreasonable for an operator to say > that everything that is a candidate to be mentioned in a PICS is a legitimate > candidate for being advertised using this mechanism. Which means the amount > of information is likely to become very large – especially once it becomes > the de facto way of providing protocol management information. > > The justification seems to be that we don’t have anything better – which > represents a longstanding failure of the management plane. While I agree with > you that management plane solutions are not adequate – not least because we > can’t get the industry to converge on a single solution – this does not mean > we should invest in the wrong solution. > > We would be better served spending time and effort working on the right > solution - as difficult as that may be. > > If we despair of getting a management plane solution, my suggestion would be > to use RFC 6823/6822 to define an IS-IS protocol management application that > could support the advertisement of such information. This is technically > straightforward to define/implement, easily extensible, and it separates the > management information from the information used by the protocol. And > because a separate topology can be used for the “management instance”, it > would be possible to reduce the number of copies in the network. A blue dump truck is not an architectural improvement over a red dump truck and definitely not the right solution. What we need is a management plane mechanism that can be easily consulted, even by nodes not running the IGP. Or nodes not running any IGP. We should NOT require storing the management data on every node. That’s silly. Rather, we should have a set of distributed, synchronized servers that can be easily referenced and updated. We need an auto-discovery mechanism so that nodes can learn where these servers are. We need a common hierarchical data schema so that data is organized consistently. And we needed this in 1992. ;-) Even if you agree with this, I am not willing to stall the current work the decades that it will take for the IETF to make progress on this. Tony
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