Please pardon this intrusion in the usual operational chatter. I have been working on the successor to the BGP MIB within IETF over the last several years. As part of a review of the current draft of this MIB (http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-idr-bgp4-mibv2-07) I have been requested to gather operational consensus regarding being able to configure your BGP peering sessions from within the MIB. Please see the forward below for the details. The BGP MIBv2 is attempting to address some operational holes with regards to the current BGP MIB. These issues include IPv6 support and also better counters for your peering session. In addition to feedback on the configuration objects issue I'd appreciate general feedback on the MIB on or off the list. My goal is to resolve all remaining open issues with the MIB within the next few months and get it into working group last call. A reference implementation in Quagga will likely follow. -- Jeff ----- Forwarded message from Jeffrey Haas <jhaas@pfrc.org> ----- Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2008 21:50:00 -0400 From: Jeffrey Haas <jhaas@pfrc.org> To: idr@ietf.org Subject: [Idr] Configuration objects in BGP MIB v2: Call for consenus Working Group, Back around 2005 I had a number of discussions with people who had provided input for the BGP MIBv2 work. These conversations were specifically regarding the configuration objects in the MIB. draft-ietf-idr-bgp4-mibv2-05 was the last version of the MIB that contained the proposed configuration objects. The results of those discussions were effectively that the configuration mechanisms in that MIB were too complex and had some potential issues. In particular: - Modern BGP implementations tend to be more complex than the feature set covered by the proposed MIBs. It was not possible to configure all session specific features from the MIB. Since the base MIB is not intended to cover all possible current and future features this is problematic. - Configuration of peering sessions are not sufficient to fully implement BGP in an operational network. BGP fundamentally requires policy for the population of the Ribs. Policy elements and algebra vary considerably among vendors. Providing a general policy engine for BGP in the MIB is likely out of scope of this work. Presume that the structural issues from draft-05 may be addressed. Should they be addressable, do we wish to pursue including configuration objects in the BGP MIB? Given the operational impact of this issue, I would appreciate it if this call for consensus was distributed within and without IETF. I will be forwarding this to NANOG as a first step. -- Jeff