Slashdot Mirror
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?"
hmmm, I wonder if this will catch on as quickly as IPv6 has.....
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
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.
If I don't see Cisco and/or Nortel on the list, it's not going to replace SNMP anytime soon. Correction: _ever_.
.
-- I care not for your foolish signatures.
The real power of snmp is what you can achieve through scripting it - queries and updates etc.
That becomes nigh-on impossible with this WS-Management craziness.
Typical Microsoft - always thinking there is some pleb click-clicking away.
Imagine you have to change some rmon threshold on 400+ devices, or integrate this with the corporate asset database.
Now you get the picture.
The SNMP MIB tree is hierarchical. For example, the "version" parameter of NET-SNMP can be found by querying:
Furthermore, these names have corresponding OID numbers, which are universally unique.
So why not just add builtin event notification to snmp?
What, like SNMP traps?
Come on.. this stuff ain't new. :)
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Are you fucking kidding?
What an amazingly "Score: 5, Insightful" observation. It's almost enough to make a person believe that Intel doesn't sell more chips for networking and embedded applications than they do desktop CPUs. Which they do.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
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.