On Tue, 6 Dec 2011 11:07:44 -0500, Keegan Holley <keegan.holley@sungard.com> said:
KH> Admittedly, you will have to deal with proprietary mibs and reformat KH> the data once it's returned. That's the nail in the coffin of just about every configuration protocol. Until multiple vendors implement a common model, no technology is going to work. SNMP certainly suffered from multiple vendors doing different things in their private MIBs while also implementing the standard MIBs is a standard way. You could probably get two vendors (X and Y) to agree that all devices have N interfaces with M-bit counters to represent traffic. The problem, especially with configuration, comes when vendor X uses virtual interfaces (eth0:1) to model interfaces with multiple addresses and vendor Y uses a single interface identifier with a sub-tail to list all the addresses assigned to the interface. Now this problem is at least solvable, given enough code, to take a configuration set from one device and covert it to the other, which in part is the goal of netconf: to enable a language that will hopefully allow a transformation process to succeed and thus bring about the holy grail of a singular management protocol. But in the end, every problem will still end up in the odd case where vendor X produces a config set with 2 "rows" and vendor Y produces a config set with 3 "rows" and no magical transformation can possibly get from point A to point B because the data models simply don't align. At all. When the internals aren't compatable, there isn't a data model to be written. No matter if it's in txt, SMIv2, XML, yang or moon dust. And hence the reason homogeneous networks with rdist distributed config files were born. -- Wes Hardaker