Subject: FW: Minneapolis Meeting Minutes - DRAFT

From: Rob Frye <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 08:07:14 -0500

Below is my draft to submit as meeting minutes from the DisMan session
at IETF 44.  I took notes in a bullet-style capturing the conversation
to be able to attribute comments to individuals, then turned that into
the text below.  Please provide comments by this Sunday, March 28.

-- Rob Frye.

=====================================
DISMAN
Minneapolis, 03/19/1999
Chair: Randy Preshun
Reported by: Rob Frye
Charter: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/disman-charter.html

Agenda:
- Welcome, Introduction, Charter URL
- Administrative issues
- Status of current documents
- Technical presentations
- Wrapup

The disman working group met at 13:00 on 1999-03-18 at the 44th IETF
meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Rob Frye recorded the meeting minutes.
There were 46 attendees.  The group briefly discussed the three DisMan
drafts which are currently in working group last call, and spent most
of the time working through issues with the remote operations draft,
trying to focus on getting this document to last call.
Although several possible additions or extensions to this work were
discussed, the current path forward will be to complete this document
without further embellishment.

The Working Group chair, Randy Preshun, took care of Administrative
matters quickly.  Rob Frye agreed to be the minutes taker, Signup
sheets were distributed, and it was stated that there should be no
time allocation restrictions as the time was not expected to run over.

Randy provided the status of the current documents.  The
Script (draft-ietf-disman-script-mib-08) and
Schedule (draft-ietf-disman-schedule-mib-06) MIBs
have been approved by the WG and IESG and should be
assigned RFC numbers soon.
The Notify and Log MIB (draft-ietf-disman-notif-log-mib-09),
Event MIB (draft-ietf-disman-event-mib-06), and
Expression MIB (draft-ietf-disman-express-mib-08)
are currently in WG last call.

The Notify and Log MIB was discussed next.  Only five participants in
the meeting had already read the draft.  The chair pointed out an asymmetry
of events placed in the Log MIB.  Local events are filtered to check
permissions of the log owner before writing an event to the log.
Remote events have no filtering done (due mostly to VACM considerations
with [stateless] proxy implementations).  The group was comfortable with
this reported asymmetry and expects no problem with approval by the IESG.

The Event MIB has one week remaining for WG last call.  One question was
raised by the chair regarding the "strange limits" of object
mteResourceSampleMinimum (-1 | 1..600).  Bob Stewart agreed that since
he was the one who created it that he would investigate and document why
those particular limits.  If no good reason is found then the architectural
constraints will be lifted.  If no other concerns are raised, it will
complete WG last call.

The Expression MIB has also had review by very few readers.  There was a
moderate amount of discussion regarding indexing to support VACM (owner
indexes), and the implications of other MIBs using owner indices defined
as groups within VACM context.  It was requested that the framework document
describe this issue, but no action was taken on that request.  The
number of users defined within a group impacts the number of outstanding
requests (eg: number of pings) that any user within that group could
have at once.  One VACM user/group having only one outstanding
action/test was deemed too restrictive.  There was further discussion on
this issue for the Remote Operations document, which is described below.

The next discussion for the Expression MIB was about ping delay distribution
analysis.  This turned into a more general discussion about "binning"
capabilities.
The chair suggested that we ask another WG to define general-purpose
distribution
analysis functions and requirements.  The group consensus was that simple
delay
distribution is important and helpful, and could easily be defined by
the DisMan WG.  There were several concerns raised regarding what is the
cutoff between what statistics we should build in now vs follow-on work,
considering that distribution analysis is a very rich field.  It was
generally
agreed that Min/max/average calculations should be provided in basic MIBs,
and
that results in the Expression MIB can capture more complex items.  There
was
some concern about performance issues of shuffling data from the Expression
MIB
to some other summary statistics MIB.  The group consensus was clearly that
we
have to define a cutoff on the complexity that the group would undertake at
this
time, particularly considering that user customization can add significant
complexity to binning algorithms.  Other examples of the use of binning
methods
(eg TN3270, ARPMIB) were given, and in those cases the complexity is
limited.
The final group decision was to keep discussion open on the list, for Bob
Stewart,
Carl Kalbfleisch and Russell Dietz to add basic binning to the Remote
Operations
MIB, that it is important now to make sure that MIBs record their
results in a manner that would accomodate binning and analysis, and
that the A-D will consider where an appropriate place would be for
general purpose binning and distribution analysis.  During the Remote
Operations MIB discussion, Bob Stewart and Bob Moore were asked to
contribute a strawman for generic data gathering capabilities with
wildcarding similar to wildcard capabilities defined for the Expression MIB.

The Remote Operations draft was next discussed.  A general policy
question on addressing was raised, whether to allow Domain Names
vs IP Addresses of target systems.  The consensus on the list was
to allow Domain Names.  Problems were noted between INS, DNS, etc being
out of sync and that resolvers do not tell how names are resolved
nor what precedence was used for resolution.  Both of these pieces of
information are deemed useful for operations and end users.  The chair
requested Jon Saperia to summarize RFC 1612 (DNS Resolver MIB Extensions)
and other standards for this.  Bert Wijnen, A-D, noted that if we do not
include name resolver feedback now, we can easily add it later when going
to DRAFT status but that it is harder to add it later if not in the document
initially.  There was no strong feeling to change the document for now.
When Jon Saperia posts more information to the list further resolver
information could be added when other changes are made to the document.

There was further concern when discussing the Lookup MIB that adding
an extra DNS response time would be a "slippery slope": how far do
we go with putting in response timers, and where do we stop?
After considerable discussion, it was decided that we should add
response time to the resolver part of the Lookup MIB unless it
extends the WG time.

Another "slippery slope" was the area of other implementations, tests
and tools like ping, particularly for non-IP protocols.  After agreeing
on the usefullness of this, it was decided that the addition of
control objects and a list of protocols to make it generic would not
solve the problem -- the capability to do ping-like operations in other
protocols would take considerable effort to understand and document.
The final consensus was to not undertake this work at this time.

The issue of indexing and VACM groups was again discussed within the
context of the Remote Operations document.  A better explanation of the
problem was given.  The final group decision on this matter was that it
needed further discussion on the list, but that indexing of the form
"table.owner.dest.testid" was probably the right approach.  The
additional "testid" index could be done either via testAndIncrement
or RowStatus objects.  The reason for "dest" as an index is to limit
access to certain tests for certain destinations.

The meeting concluded with a reminder to send minutes to the disman list
and [email-masked].

---

From: Juergen Schoenwaelder <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 15:41:57 +0100

>>>>> Rob Frye writes:

Rob> The Expression MIB has also had review by very few readers.
Rob> There was a moderate amount of discussion regarding indexing to
Rob> support VACM (owner indexes), and the implications of other MIBs
Rob> using owner indices defined as groups within VACM context.  It
Rob> was requested that the framework document describe this issue,
Rob> but no action was taken on that request.  The number of users
Rob> defined within a group impacts the number of outstanding requests
Rob> (eg: number of pings) that any user within that group could have
Rob> at once.  One VACM user/group having only one outstanding
Rob> action/test was deemed too restrictive.  There was further
Rob> discussion on this issue for the Remote Operations document,
Rob> which is described below.

Rob> The next discussion for the Expression MIB was about ping delay
Rob> distribution analysis.

Since when does the Expression MIB do pings? (I guess its time to read
the latest version now and to send in last call comments...)

							Juergen
-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder  [email-masked] http://www.cs.tu-bs.de/~schoenw
Technical University Braunschweig, Dept. Operating Systems & Computer Networks
Bueltenweg 74/75, 38106 Braunschweig, Germany.        (Tel. +49 531 / 391 3289)

---

From: Rob Frye <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 15:53:26 -0500

Sorry, poorly stated.  Expression MIB doesn't do pings.  The VACM
interaction for ping, etc is in Remote Operations MIB.  Expression
has to do with gathering the results of the ping in delay distributions.
The topic of VACM owner indexes came up in discussing Expression MIB.

Thanks for catching it.

-- Rob.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Rob Frye ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sr. Network Management Architect   Email:          [email-masked]
MCI WorldCom                       Phone: +1-703-715-7225/V272-7225
2100 Reston Parkway, Suite 600     Fax:   +1-703-715-7436/V272-7436
Reston, VA  20191                  Pager:           +1-888-270-1537
~~~~~~~~~~~Strive always to generate more light than heat~~~~~~~~~~

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked]
> [mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf Of Juergen Schoenwaelder
> Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 1999 9:42 AM
> To: [email-masked]
> Cc: [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: FW: Minneapolis Meeting Minutes - DRAFT
> 
> 
> 
> >>>>> Rob Frye writes:
> 
> Technical University 
> Braunschweig, Dept. Operating Systems & Computer Networks