Phil, you just read my mind... One more word - and you should reverse the data tree by this way to allow 'wildcard' requests and to allow easily add vendor branch to the every part of the tree. LDAP was (in this discussion) an other interesting idea, too. Alex (R).
IMHO, the ideal compromise would be a TCP based program that would take a full set of information requests, gather all of the data in an atomic way so that time domain analysis is at least consistent (maybe even an option to schedule data collection at a precise time and pick it up later), and dump all of that data rapidly back over a single connection. If I were to embark on implementing such a thing right now, I'd probably do it as a POST method within HTTP, defining a new MIME type to encapsulate the bulk request, and a new MIME type to encapsulate the bulk response. Authentication would be in the HTTP request and headers. You specify all the MIBs you want, including range and pattern requests, and all the responses have all the MIB types attached. The MIBs could be encoded as dotted decimal or hexadecimal, but I'd definitely _not_ use ASN.1/BER (everything will be "text safe"). If the device just doesn't have the resources to handle a large request (such as not enough memory to record a snapshot of what you want to see all at once), then the time-atomic aspect will have to be abandoned and the data will then be picked up, encoded, and delivered sequentially. But the one important thing is that it will be possible to request "everything" all at once, if desired (and I desire it).
The problem with this is that it will take getting business managers to recognize there is a problem. But business managers are not really into the kinds of raw information that technical people are into. Business managers are more into pretty color graphics. Then when they see pretty colored graphics as tools for their very expnsive investments (e.g. the deployment of all those backbone routers) they feel all warm and fuzzy all over, and expect the technical people to feel the same (which works fine in a totally manually operated environment, and falls apart in a programmed, highly automated environment).
-- Phil Howard KA9WGN phil@intur.net phil@ipal.net
Aleksei Roudnev, Network Operations Center, Relcom, Moscow (+7 095) 194-19-95 (Network Operations Center Hot Line),(+7 095) 230-41-41, N 13729 (pager) (+7 095) 196-72-12 (Support), (+7 095) 194-33-28 (Fax)