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From: sean@dsl.pitt.edu (Sean McLinden)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: CMOT Implementations
Message-ID: <1990Mar17.062619.6200@cadre.dsl.pitt.edu>
Date: 17 Mar 90 06:26:19 GMT
References: <9003161713.AA01109@trwind.TRW.COM> <9003170417.AA26725@psi.com>
Sender: news@cadre.dsl.pitt.edu (Usenet News System)
Organization: Decision Systems Laboratory, Univ. of Pittsburgh, PA.
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In article <9003170417.AA26725@psi.com> schoff@PSI.COM ("Martin Lee Schoffstall") writes:
>
>Now the question is will SNMP knock out CMIP itself in the area of NMS/agent
>management within the OSI stack.

I sincerely hope not. SNMP is probably adequate for the task of network
management of networks and the full implementation of CMIP is, most likely,
overkill for what are basic network management tasks, but when you start
talking about the management of network objects that represent the
state of the real world (I mean, the computers are there to support
more than their network connections!) is when you see the real power
of a protocol like CMIP.

At the risk of sounding heretical, my personal opinion is that an
implementation of CMOT would make TCP/IP sufficiently robust as to
make it an attractive competitor to OSI (at least until we run
out of addresses). To put this another way, the real appeal of
OSI (and there are a lot of unappealing things about it), is not
the market hype but what is the OSI concept of information as it
exists in communities (an idea retrofitted to TCP/IP with such tools
as XDR, RPC, Threads...). With a generalized interface to what is
network information a la CM{IP,OT} you have a pretty powerful system
which has the advantage of being widely available across multiple
architectures. Until full implementations of the OSI stack
become widely available CMOT would extend the functionality of TCP/IP
as an OSI prototyping tool for, at least, the next few years, allowing
for the applications to be developed in parallel with the network.

Sean McLinden
Decision Systems Laboratory
University of Pittsburgh