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agentx-minutes-96jun.txt
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1996-10-07
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Editor's note: These minutes have not been edited.
The most active participants in the discussions (a few names were
missed due to inattentiveness on the part of the note- taker) were: Uri
Blumenthal, Jeff Case, Mike Daniele, Maria Greene, Bob Natale, Bill
Norton, David Partain, Dave Perkins, Randy Presuhn, Juergen
Schoenwaelder, Bob Stewart, Randy Turner, Glenn Waters, Bert
Wijnen, and Steve Zilles. About 80 people were present at the meetings.
Meeting notes were taken by Dale Francisco, wg editor.
Meeting 1 (Tue, June 25, 09:00-11:30)
-------------------------------------
WG chair Bob Natale opened the meeting with a brief summary of the
meeting agenda, a charter review, and a summary of progress to date.
He praised the work of Mike Daniele in coming up with an initial
protocol draft, of David Keeney in creating and maintaining an agentx
web page, and of Bert Wijnen and others who provided extensive
review comments of the draft both on and off the list.
The chair stated that the primary goals of this wg meeting were to do a
detailed review and discussion of the agentx protocol draft, and to come
up with a schedule and commitments on actions needed to meet the
goals set forth in the charter.
He then began a review and discussion of the agentx protocol draft. Two
points concerning SNMP and the agentx framework were raised:
o The draft should be consistent in using SNMPv2
as the SNMP base protocol.
o Though for the purposes of the draft document,
master agent and subagents are restricted to the agentx protocol (not
SNMP) for all communication between them, this is not meant to
constrain other interfaces that these processing entities might have.
There was a long discussion on the issue of OID representation in agentx
and support for non-ASCII character sets. Bert Wijnen described the
translation burdens that the proposed ASCII representation of OIDs
would impose on master and subagent entities in non-ASCII
environments. Randy Presuhn pointed out that even in ASCII
environments, ASCII representation of OIDs would be space inefficient,
expensive to translate to and from BER, and would not collate correctly.
A consensus was reached to use a binary encoding for OIDs (probably
integer vector), and to remove any text in the draft that referred to
character set selection.
The second half of the meeting began with introductory remarks from
Mike Daniele, author of the protocol draft, on what he considered some
important topics for discussion: procedures for registration and
dispatch; whether or not to include information about the originating
management request's SNMP version in messages from the master agent
to subagents; how to resolve ties among subagents in the case of exactly
duplicate registrations; and whether it was worth having a subagent
flag registrations of fully-qualified instances, in order to allow the
master agent to optimize getnext processing.
A discussion followed concerning subagent registration and the issues of
priority, naming scope, and duplicate registration. Randy Presuhn
argued that allowing a master agent to return a different (lower)
priority than the one a subagent attempted to register at was sufficient
to cover most cases of conflicting registration among subagents; Bert
Wijnen and others felt that this was overloading priority, and that
some of the bits in the flags field (h.flags) might be used to indicate,
for instance, that a subagent wanted a non- overlapping registration of
some MIB region (that is, a registration that would neither displace a
subagent already registered for some or all of that region, nor be subject
to being itself displaced subsequent to registration).
On the question of whether or not to include information about the
originating management request's SNMP version in messages from the
master agent to subagents, almost everyone agreed that it was
esthetically offensive to pass this information to the subagent; at the
same time, some felt that the potential for burning CPU cycles with
futile getnexts to a v2-syntax columnar object made it worth the wart.
Further discussion on mailing list was thought necessary before this
could be resolved.
Meeting 2 (Wed, June 26, 13:00-15:00)
-------------------------------------
The review of the protocol draft continued with consideration of section
6, "Protocol Definitions", beginning with the Register PDU. Many felt
that exact duplicate or overlapping registrations should be disallowed,
either by rejecting registration requests or by reassigning priorities so as
to remove the duplication. Jeff Case felt that overlapping registrations
at the same priority could be accommodated either by allowing the
master agent to decide which subagents to call, or by calling all
overlapping agents and choosing the "best" answer. Randy Presuhn
suggested subagents might use in registration requests a flag bit that
would indicate overlapping registration was acceptable, in order to
catch common cases in which overlap was a mistake (e.g., someone left
an old, buggy subagent running). He also felt that the logic needed in
the master agent to handle overlapping registration at equivalent
priority was probably little more than was already required to do
getnext and getbulk processing. This was a large topic; further
discussion was deferred to the mail list.
A question was raised as to whether the reason code (u.reason) was
needed in the Unregister PDU. Several people felt that a reason code
might be useful in reducing finger-pointing in a multivendor subagent
situation. It was decided to reserve judgement until implementation
experience showed if the reason code was actually useful.
It was agreed that there needed to be a more detailed specification of
how a master agent implements an access control policy.
It was pointed out that the draft lacks a section on Set processing.
There was a brief discussion of the "alone" bit in h.flags; this would be
used to tell a subagent during a Set operation that, because it was the
only subagent affected, it didn't need to wait for "commit" and "end"
PDUs. Most felt that this was an unnecessary optimization.
The meeting ended with the agreement that many of the architectural
questions that had been raised during the Montreal wg meetings would
have to be resolved on the mailing list. Bob Natale appealed for help
in filling in unfinished portions of the draft, and expressed the hope
that with sufficient progress on the protocol specification, we might be
able to do interoperability testing at the Atlanta Interop (September
16-20, 1996).