[ih] inter-network communication history

Fri Nov 8 13:01:59 PST 2019

Things went off the rails with SNMP because they didn’t understand the importance of commonality across MIBs until it was too late.  In the mid-80s we were able to create considerable commonality across technologies for a product we did at Motorola and it provided considerable leverage and was much more powerful. It was able to do things that are still not possible.

Maximizing commonality across devices is what makes network management easy.  At the same time, one has to be careful to let what has to be different be different.  But the big advantage with network management is that the communication must have a fair amount of commonality or it won’t work.

Once that horse was out of that barn, the game was over.  It was all complexity after that.  While YANG and NETCONF may have taken over, the horse has never been put back.  And to my mind there hasn’t been any real progress in network management in decades.

Take care,
John

> On Nov 8, 2019, at 14:41, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> Marshall Rose once told me that he regretted the "S" in SNMP, because it
> was anything but simple. And I think he also said that ASN/1 was chosen
> mainly to build bridges with the OSI world. But SNMP was a success (about
> 300 related RFCs exist).
> 
> Anyway, NETCONF and YANG are currently taking over the universe. I haven't
> noticed a new MIB module in the IETF world for quite a while. Only two
> MIB RFCs were published in 2018, and none this year. There are also only
> two MIBs in Internet Draft format, one started in 2014 and the other started
> in 2016. MIBs are apparently a dying breed. There are currently 152 active
> Internet Drafts related to YANG. Game over.
> 
> Regards
>   Brian Carpenter
> 
> On 09-Nov-19 06:54, Craig Partridge via Internet-history wrote:
>> On Fri, Nov 8, 2019 at 10:20 AM John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net> wrote:
>> 
>>> You told me once the implementation was smaller. Also, I also know from
>>> Randy Presuhn that the CMIP implementation was smaller than SNMP as well.
>>> It seemed that lexicographical order takes more code that object-oriented.
>>> For me, HEMS would have been a better way forward.  A few years earlier
>>> IEEE 802 had tried a protocol like SNMP and found it inferior, which is why
>>> CMIP was done.  Also that HEMS used TCP for request/response and UDP for
>>> events was simply sane, rather than trying to do everything over UDP. In
>>> which case, GetNest is unnecessary. The inability to get a snapshot of
>>> anything large-ish was a real problem.
>>> 
>> 
>> Your recollection is better than mine.  I have a vague recollection that
>> the initial SNMP implementations were large because they had some ASN
>> library or code generator that generated volumes of code, while HEMS had a
>> much tighter handwritten ASN.1 module.  I don't know if that would have
>> been true in perpetuity.
>> 
>> 
>>> 
>>> A further advantage would have been had by CMIP since it could use the
>>> Packed-Encoding Rules for ASN.1 rather than having to use the Basic
>>> Encoding Rules wired into SNMP.  PER was sufficiently efficient that often
>>> compressing a PER encoding was larger.
>>> 
>> 
>> BER was wired into HEMS to support the private MIBs.
>> 
>> Craig
>> 
>> 
>> 
> -- 
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history

-- 
Internet-history mailing list
Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history