RFC 1109 (rfc1109) - Page 2 of 8
Report of the second Ad Hoc Network Management Review Group
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 1109 Internet Management August 1989 The current public subtree of the Internet MIB contains roughly 100 variables (i.e., managed objects) agreed by the SNMP and CMOT working groups as mandatory for Internet network management. The June 12, 1989 meeting which this document reports was convened to review the progress to date, to determine whether actions were needed to foster further evolution of network management tools and to recommend specific actions in this area to the IAB. SNMP STATUS Immediately after the meeting reported in RFC 1052, a group was convened to make extensions and changes to the predecessor to SNMP: Simple Gateway Monitoring Protocol. A "connectathon" was held at NYSERNet, an RFC published, and demonstrations of network management tools using SNMP were offered in the Fall at Interop 88 [a conference and show presented by Advanced Computing Environments (ACE)]. The protocol is in use in a number of networks within the Internet as well as in private packet networks internationally. A number of vendor implementations are in the field (e.g., cisco Systems, Proteon, The Wollongong Group), vendor independent reference implementations (e.g., NYSERNet, Case and Key in Tennessee) along with some freely available versions (e.g., MIT, CMU). It is important to note that while the common Internet Management Information Base has roughly 100 variables, a typical SNMP monitoring system may support anywhere from 100 to 200 ADDITIONAL objects which have been defined in private or experimental MIB space. Many of these are device or protocol dependent variables. Scaling to include larger numbers of monitored objects and subsystems remains a challenge. It was observed that fault monitoring was easier to scale than performance and configuration monitoring, since the former may operate on an exception basis while the latter is more likely to require periodic reporting. CMOT STATUS RFC 1095 (CMOT) was recently published and built upon experience gained earlier with prototype implementations demonstrated at Interop 88 in the Fall of that year. The present specification for CMOT is based on the ISO Draft International Standard version of Common Management Information Protocol (CMIP). The CMIP is being moved to International Standard status, though the precise timing is not perfectly clear. It will happen late in 1989 or perhaps in the first quarter of 1990. Some changes will be made to correct known errors and the CMIP document itself will probably be restructured. During this discussion, it was pointed out that there is much to Cerf
