CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_ Reported by Bernhard Stockman/EBONE Minutes of the Operational Statistics Working Group (OPSTAT) Agenda o RFC1404 Deployment Experience o Client/Server Protocol: Presentation by ANS o Statistical MIB RFC1404 Deployment Experience Daniel Karrenberg reported that the efforts to convert MONSTER to use RFC1404 have not progressed. Due to resource constraints further development of MONSTER has been put on indefinite hold. What would be needed to make it use RFC1404 is just a relatively simple reformatter. Further it could need a rewrite of the actual SNMP polling function since this uses the snmp capable awk from ISODE which is very hard to install. Daniel renewed his offer to get started, those people who are interested in continuing work on Monster. Craig Haney who was not present at the Working Group meeting has a PERL parser for the RFC1404 format. A list of problems were reported with RFC1404: o In the syntax for device-fields multiple tag-tables are not delimited syntactically. Proposed solutions: - Count preceding - Different field separator withing tag-table - Bracketing tag-table with something BEGIN-TAGT, END-TAGT - Bracketing with The Group decided to use s around tag-table. This will lead to a revision of the BNF: device-section ::= "BEGIN_DEVICE" "END_DEVICE" device-field ::= "{" "}" 1 [ "{" "}" ] Action: Bernhard volunteered to check for similar problems and report via mail. After the discussion the Group decided to collect more problem reports from implementors before trying to issue another RFC. There IS interest in USING tools following the RFC out there. There is not much interest in actually producing the tools. FARNET (who?) might produce some funding for developing PD tools. Question: Who would be interested? No immediate interest. Action: Bernhard will send a message to the list about this and try to find capable implementors. Anyone interested persons should contact Bernhard. Client/Server Protocol The intention is to make (aggregated) statistical information available from a server. A strawman document is being developed. The following reports were given: o Henry Clark reported on implementation experience. Login is primitive direct string comparison. Separate configuration file defining the view of the users. Server runs use psi formant but don't use opstat. o Ittai Herhman reported on a similar system currently being used at ANS which originated at Merit. Refer to slides. o Vikas Aggarwal also showed some examples of reports. Both Vikas and Ittai remarked that from limited experiments they have done it seems that for line utilisation there is little difference between 15 minute and 1 minute sampling. A preliminary document is being done. The Group went into architectural brainstorm mode and reached the following conclusions: o There is agreement to generalise the authorisation passed by login to generic authentication strings and leave in the authentication method used as a local matter beyond the scope. o Select shouldn't return the data, there should be a separate "get" command to initiate that, multiple selections are possible and identified by a selection ID which can be specified by client and will be returned by server. 2 o Status command to find out status of what is currently selected especially the amount of data. Action: Bernhard Stockman will change the strawman accordingly. Statistical MIB Consensus is that a short list of HIGLY DESIRABLE variables should be agreed upon and forwarded to the ?? WG for inclusion in the next Internet Standard MIB. Action: Bernhard will forward a list of all so far proposed variables to the list and re-start discussion. Attendees Vikas Aggarwal aggarwal@jvnc.net David Bolen db3l@ans.net Erik-Jan Bos erik-jan.bos@surfnet.nl Rebecca Bostwick bostwick@es.net Douglas Carson carson@utcc.utoronto.ca James Cassell jcassell@dsac.dla.mil Henry Clark henryc@oar.net David Conrad davidc@iij.ad.jp Roger Fajman raf@cu.nih.gov Stefan Fassbender stf@easi.net Dale Finkelson dmf@westie.mid.net Eric Fleischman ericf@act.boeing.com Paul Franchois paulf@bldrdoc.gov Kenneth Goodwin goodwin@a.psc.edu Ittai Hershman ittai@ans.net Daniel Karrenberg daniel@ripe.net Kim Long klong@sura.net David Lovering lovering@bldrdoc.gov Daniel McRobb dwm@noc.ans.net Greg Minshall minshall@wc.novell.com Bob Morgan morgan@networking.stanford.edu Marsha Perrott mlp+@andrew.cmu.edu Robert Reschly reschly@brl.mil Steven Richardson sjr@merit.edu Vilson Sarto vilson@fapq.fapesp.br Richard Woundy rwoundy@vnet.ibm.com 3