Requirements for Configuration Management of IP-based Networks (RFC3139)

Network Working Group L. Sanchez Request for Comments: 3139 Megisto Category: Informational K. McCloghrie Cisco J. Saperia JDS Consultant June 2001

Requirements for Configuration Management of IP-based Networks

Status of this Memo

This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2001). All Rights Reserved.

Abstract

This memo discusses different approaches to configure networks and identifies a set of configuration management requirements for IP- based networks.

Table of Contents

1.0 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1.1 Motivation, Scope and Goals of this document . . . . . . . 2 1.2 Requirements Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.3 Audience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.4 Definition of Technical Terms. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2.0 Statement of the Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 3.0 Requirements for an IP-based Configuration Management System . 7 4.0 Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Authors’ Addresses. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Full Copyright Statement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Sanchez, et al. Informational [Page 1]

RFC 3139 Requirements for Configuration Management June 2001

1.0 Introduction

1.1 Motivation, Scope and Goals of this document

A number of IETF working groups have introduced new technologies which offer integrated and differentiated services. To support these new technologies, working group members found that they had new requirements for configuration of these technologies. One of these new requirements was for the provisioning (configuration) of behavior at the network level.

An example of this type of configuration would be instructing all routers in a network to provide ’gold’ service to a particular set of customers. Depending on the specific network equipment and definition of ’gold’ service, this configuration request might translate to different configuration parameters on different vendors equipment and many individual configuration commands at the router. This higher level of configuration management has come to commonly be known as policy based management.

Working groups associated with these new technologies believed that the existing SNMP based management framework, while adequate for fault, configuration management at the individual instance (e.g., interface) level, performance and other management functions commonly associated with it, was not able to meet these new needs. As a result they began working on new solutions and approaches.

COPS [COPS] for RSVP [RSVP] provides routers with the opportunity to ask their Policy Server for an admit/reject decision for a particula...