Re: ISMS working group and charter problems

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Hi Eliot,

[I am writing as a participant in ISMS and other SNMP-related WGs. This note is not intended to represent the reasoning that I would use ot make a decision about the ISMS charter in an IESG context.]

As you know, I disagree with your opinion that call-home functionality should be added to the ISMS charter for three reasons:

(1) I don't think that call home fits within the scope of the ISMS group. I am not necessarily saying that we shouldn't do this somewhere in the IETF, just not in this WG.

IMO, the ISMS group has one very important purpose: Many people are using SNMPv1/v2 today and have not upgraded to SNMPv3 because of the (perceived) cost and complexity of deploying SNMPv3 security. ISMS will integrate SNMP security with existing, widely-deployed security infrastructure such as SSH and RADIUS, so hopefully people will start using SNMP security.

This is a security area WG. It is not charged with producing a next-generation of SNMP, just with the (important) task of integrating the current generation of SNMP with more widely-deployed security mechanisms. I personally think that tightly-scoped WGs are good. I also think that it would be inappropriate to add new architectural features to SNMP in a security area WG.

(2) I do think that call home represents a significant architectural change to SNMP, for the same reasons that Randy Presuhn has offered. I'd also like to emphasize one of his points -- we have already defined how SNMP runs over TCP (in RFC 3430), so ISMS is not the first group to consider this. Running SNMP over TCP did not require the types of operational changes that you are discussing.

IMO, the idea of an SNMP command responder (agent) initiating the communication is not as simple as you have portrayed it. There are many open questions, like: How would the command responder know what manager(s) to contact? When should the command responder try to initiate the communication? How often should it re-try if the initial contact fails? What should it do if the connection drops?

SNMP command responders are stateless entities that simply respond to the queries they receive in the order that they receive them. Changing them so that they can initiate and effectively manage a communication connection to the manager is a pretty big change, IMO.

(3) I am not certain that there are a large number of people who want to initiative SNMP management communication through a NAT/Firewall who do not have the ability to allow/tunnel an SSH connection through that same NAT/Firewall.

In my experience, NATs and Firewalls are usually placed at the boundaries of an administrative area. In many cases, they are intentionally used to prevent access to internal systems from the outside. I have not run into many cases where a network administrator has wanted to allow management access to systems from outside of the local network, but perhaps you have?

If you do believe that this is a common need, I think that you will need to better define/explain your use cases.

Margaret


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