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Goodbye SNMP? Hello, WS-Management
Laoping writes "News.com has a story about a new Web services management specification designed to simplify network administration across a wide range of devices. A bunch of a big tech companies developed it together (Microsoft, Intel, AMD, Dell and Sun). Microsoft will build support for WS-Management into an update to Windows Server, which is due late next year, and in the version of its Microsoft Operations Manager management software due in 2006. The .PDF release, that makes it clear that it is meant to be a Simple Network Management Protocol killer. Now I am all for a replacement for SNMP, but is this the way go?"
The moron submitting the summary says "goodbye [long established and well entrenched technology]". SNMP has been around for a very, very long time. No matter how much better this is, it will not replace SNMP any time soon.
Read the article about the 32-bit MCUs a few stories down for yet another example.
SNMP is not going anywhere anytime soon, until the major network players adopt WS-Management (that's if they adopt it at all). Looking at the PDF there are some major players missing, Cisco, Juniper, 3Com, HP, to name a few.
will it be encumbered by patents? looking at the contributors, my guess is yes
... i mean, you'll probably need (by the time it comes out) at least a 3.8Ghz P4 and 2G of RAM
snmp v3 works perfectly fine as it is. let's leave well enough alone
but, this will probably work out well for intel
vodka, straight up, thank you!
If I don't see Cisco and/or Nortel on the list, it's not going to replace SNMP anytime soon. Correction: _ever_.
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-- I care not for your foolish signatures.
I thought that the open replacement for SNMP was WBEM. Microsoft, in fact, has already implimented this, basically, as WMI, or Windows Management Instrumentation.
Anyone know why this is suddenly being pushed, and not WBEM?
There's no real incentive to move to IPv6, at least not in the western world, as there's plenty of IPv4 address space left. Apart from that there's also the perceived complexity of IPv6 (long hex numbers, so it must be more complicated than shorter decimal numbers).
If you've worked with SNMP, you know that it is a technically solid solution - low on resources, fast. However, SNMP _is_ complex. Finding OIDs in large MIBs, secure configuration, interpreting data are mostly difficult.
I give a technically sound, industry standard and less complex alternative for SNMP a good chance for quick adoptation.
Also on the folks churning out billions of tiny little devices. If you've only got 16K of RAM TCP is hard work let along management services while UDP is doable properly on a microcontroller.
Well, its leagues better than the Windows Management framework with relied on the rarely used (outside windows) DCE-RPC.
At least there is a 'hope' of interoperability.
Bye!
Complex, and inherently insecure.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
Besides, the nice thing about standards is that there is so many of them to choose from.
How is it possible in this era of security issues that new standards are still being drawn up without security being a requirement?
snmp v3 works perfectly fine as it is. let's leave well enough alone
:)
considering most vendors are still using v1 or v2, that should be 'lets leave snmp v3 alone'
to be perfectly honest, SNMP is anything but simple. the only thing simple about it is the protocol itself. it then got buried under avalanches of proprietary MIBs, all partially overlapping yet all mutually incompatible. some only partially documented (or not documented at all). not only that, the insistence of vendors using funky proprietary data types (or worse, strings) when existing datatypes would work perfectly fine.
what was needed imo was a MIB guideline and 'retarded implementation' verification. to ensure vendors didn't create obfuscated and spaghettified MIBs.
SNMP? what is SNMP ? Well SNMP is a "big thing" in the networking environment where all the big players develop their applications based on it for example Network Management Systems.
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SNMP has evolved from time to improving from one version to another from data retrival to security.
Well its a well establised phenomenom and no one can change it in a day as most of the big fish in this business rely on it to satisfy their appetite.
Lots and lots of work is undergoin specially in SNMPs 3rd version as most of the companies have not established their products with version 3 support.It has proved to be an invaluable entity in my NMS and other NMSs in the market.
Take for exampe those net-snmp guys they have done some tremendous using snmp support(visit:www.net-snmp.org) for more details
I really think SNMP has still got immense potential to be on the top provided some more research is undertaken.
So what?
I mean, what that moronic thing of replacing everything with this xml-over-http nonsense?
Everyone is crazy doing the same thing, except it is now all on tcp port 80. It is even impossible to apply any kind of policy without lots of application level analysis because every moron in the world is using HTTP to do everything.
SNMP is fine, and if the only thing that those people are trying to do is map SNMP OIDs using fancy representations over tcp/80, they are hardly doing any service to most network administrators out there (myself included).
It's like everyone is crazy. I hope they do not repeat that SOAP thing (which for every practical reason I've seen is just a fancy way of doing RPC)
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