RFC 1028 (rfc1028) - Page 2 of 35
Simple Gateway Monitoring Protocol
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 1028 Simple Gateway Monitoring November 1987 (3) The degree of management function that is remotely supported is accordingly increased, thereby imposing the fewest possible restrictions on the form and sophistication of management tools. (4) A simplified set of management functions is easily understood and used by developers of gateway management tools. A second design goal is that the functional paradigm for monitoring and control be sufficiently extensible to accommodate additional, possibly unanticipated aspects of gateway operation. A third goal is that the design be, as much as possible, independent of the architecture and mechanisms of particular hosts or particular gateways. Consistent with the foregoing design goals are a number of decisions regarding the overall form of the protocol design. One such decision is to model all gateway management functions as alterations or inspections of various parameter values. By this model, a protocol entity on a logically remote host (possibly the gateway itself) interacts with a protocol entity resident on the gateway in order to alter or retrieve named portions (variables) of the gateway state. This design decision has at least two positive consequences: (1) It has the effect of limiting the number of essential management functions realized by the gateway to two: one operation to assign a value to a specified configuration parameter and another to retrieve such a value. (2) A second effect of this decision is to avoid introducing into the protocol definition support for imperative management commands: the number of such commands is in practice ever-increasing, and the semantics of such commands are in general arbitrarily complex. The exclusion of imperative commands from the set of explicitly supported management functions is unlikely to preclude any desirable gateway management operation. Currently, most gateway commands are requests either to set the value of some gateway parameter or to retrieve such a value, and the function of the few imperative commands currently supported is easily accommodated in an asynchronous mode by this management model. In this scheme, an imperative command might be realized as the setting of a parameter value that subsequently triggers the desired action. Davin, Case, Fedor and Schoffstall
