really aweful naming convention I dislike

[Simon Leinen]

Andrew Fort writes:
> On 14/01/2006, at 3:25 AM, Justin Grote wrote:

>> Indeed. The closest way I could think to coming up with a unified
>> description for would be an XML DTD, but again, that's hard to
>> develop a schema that could include every possible device
>> description, and I'm not that smart :)

> does NETCONF help?  (http://www.ops.ietf.org/netconf/)

> one of netconf's aims is to allow vendor 'uniqueness' to be
> expressed.  it's more about standardising the data exchange protocol
> rather than the configuration language itself, so it doesn't solve
> the exact problem you're talking about.  The idea is to remove the
> messiness of expect-driven CLI sessions, which is a pretty good
> start.  I'm sure i got part of that wrong, though :-).

You described the approach of NETCONF quite well.

So far the IETF NETCONF WG has defined a protocol for exchanging
XML-based pieces of configuration with network devices, as well as
three alternative mappings to lower layers (a mandatory-to-implement
one over SSH and two optional ones over SOAP and BEEP).  With a bit of
luck those four documents will be published as RFCs over the next few
months.  That is mostly the "get rid of expect" stage (although RANCID
already shields you quite nicely from this).

As you are putting this so nicely, NETCONF "allows vendor uniqueness"
by lacking any standard "data model" for the XML-based configuration
pieces themselves.  The hope is that, as people gain experience with
XML-based configuration of different vendors' products, we will
eventually know enough to standardize at least common rules for
building these XML-based configuration data models.  I don't think we
will be able to define a single Standard Configuration Data Model for
all routers (let alone "every possible device" :-), because router
vendors like to differentiate themselves by improving their
configuration syntaxes.

The NETCONF WG is at an interesting point in time, with the core
protocol work getting finished (and encouraging signs of people
already implementing it).  We have recently updated the charter to
include specific goals for the addition of support of asynchronous
notifications to NETCONF.  If you want to contribute, please consider
joining the WG mailing list (follow URL mentioned above).
-- 
Simon.
NETCONF WG co-chair