[ih] GOSIP & compliance

[Craig Partridge]

Quick comments on Karl's comments (from this note and later).

ASN.1 was in SNMP because it was in HEMS.  HEMS did it to allow us to
return self-describing vendor specific data without requiring a
supplemental MIB definition.  This was important because HEMS allowed one
to ask for the full status of an aggregate object (such as an interface or
even an entire subjection of the MIB) and we wanted folks to be able to add
additional data they thought relevant to the aggregate.  ASN.1 was the only
self-describing data format of the time.

The UDP vs. TCP debate was pretty fierce and the experience of the time
came down firmly on the UDP side. Recall this was the era of daily
congestion collapse of the Internet between 1987 and 1990.

Re: doing things in Python.  I'm not surprised.  The HEMS implementation
proved reasonably small at the time.

By the way, many of the features noted in CMIP were actually in HEMS and/or
SNMP first.  We were pretty open about playing with ideas at the time and
the CMIP folks, who had an empty spec when SNMP and HEMS started, chose to
borrow liberally.  (Or, at least, that's my recollection).

There was a network management project in the late 1980s, name now eludes
me but led by Jil Wescott and DARPA funded, that sound similar in goals to
what Jack H. describes doing at Oracle.  I leaned on wisdom from those
folks (esp. the late Charlie Lynn) as Glenn Trewitt and I sought to figure
out what HEMS should look like.

As we do these assessments, it is worth remembering that the operational
community of the time was struggling with the immediate challenge of
managing networks that were flaky and ran on 68000 processors and where
only a few 100K of memory was available for the management protocols.  The
SNMP team found a way to shoe-horn the key features into that
limited footprint and it promptly made a *huge* difference.

Craig

On Sat, Mar 26, 2022 at 2:22 AM Karl Auerbach via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> ...
> BTW, I thought the use of ASN.1/BER for SNMP was far from the best
> choice (indeed, from an implementation quality and interoperability
> point of view would be hard to find one that was worse.)  I preferred
> the HEMS proposal as the most elegant, even if it did use XML.
>
> CMIP had some really good ideas (most particularly with regard to
> selecting and filtering data at the server for highly efficient bulk
> fetches.)  Marshall Rose's rehosting CMIP onto TCP (thus creating CMOT)
> was very inventive and clever.  That kinda demonstrated the potential
> viability, rather than the impossibility, of things like CMIP/T, even in
> its bloated form.
>
> Diverting from the main points here:
>
> About a dozen years ago I decided to rework SNMP, throwing out ASN.1/BER
> and using JSON, throwing out UDP and using TCP (optionally with TLS),
> and adding in some of the filtering concepts from CMIP.  I preserved
> most MIB names and instrumentation variable semantics (and thus
> preserving a lot of existing instrumentation code in devices.)
>
> The resulting running code (in Python) is quite small - on par with the
> 12kbytes (machine code) of the core of my Epilogue SNMP engine.  And it
> runs several decimal orders of magnitude faster than SNMP (in terms of
> compute cycles, network activity, and start-to-finish time.)  Plus I can
> do things like "give me all data on all interfaces with a received
> packet error rate greater than 0.1%".  I can even safely issue complex
> control commands to devices, something that SNMP can't do very well.  I
> considered doing commercial grade, perhaps open-source, version but it
> could have ended up disturbing the then nascent Netconf effort.
>
>          --karl--
>
>
> --
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>


-- 
*****
Craig Partridge's email account for professional society activities and
mailing lists.