On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 12:53:10PM +0000, Jeff Aitken wrote:
you have to have some way of describing the desired state of the network in machine-parsable format
Any suggested tools for describing the desired state of the network? NDL, the only option I'm familiar with, is just a brute-force approach to describing routers in XML. This is hardly better than a router-config, and the visualizations break down on any graph with more than a few nodes or edges. I'd need thousands to describe customer routers. Or do we just give up on describing all of those customer-facing interfaces, and only manage descriptions for the service-provider part of the network? This seems to be what people actually do with network descriptions (oversimplify), and that doesn't seem like much of a description to me. Is there a practical middle-ground between dismissing a multitude of relevant customer configuration and the data overload created by merely replicating the entire network config in a new language? Ross -- Ross Vandegrift ross@kallisti.us "If the fight gets hot, the songs get hotter. If the going gets tough, the songs get tougher." --Woody Guthrie