With these general concepts stated, I think we need to look at specifics. The discussion of Operation returns and exceptions today should be a good start. I have attached a list of operations. These should be easy.
Dealing with reports will be more complicated. (I think I said long ago that I would take a crack at the reports schema... that may be a good subject for next week). Although I agree that the failure of some actions should prompt an alert, I suggest that there are certain failures such as those alluded to in Harry's message, that may be handled differently. For example, I think that the failure of an agent to include a specified element value in a report because of policy (or for any other reason, assuming that other elements are supplied) should be indicated in the report, not in an alert.
Bill Wagner
-----Original Message-----
From: McDonald, Ira [mailto:imcdonald@sharplabs.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 05, 2004 10:10 AM
To: Wagner,William; Harry Lewis; wbmm@pwg.org
Subject: RE: WBMM> Couple Questions about Schedules
Hi,
I agree again with all of Bill's points and reasoning.
I am strongly opposed to introducing the concept of
'negotiation' into Schedule transfers. It doesn't exist
in any other NMS architecture I've seen.
In WBMM/WIMS, the Manager says "do this" (via an
embedded Action in a Schedule). And the Agent either
replies "fine by me" (with SendReport) or "Manager not
authorized" (with SendAlert).
I think it's important that SendReport _never_ be used
to report an Action failure. Only use SendAlert.
Cheers,
- Ira
Ira McDonald (Musician / Software Architect)
Blue Roof Music / High North Inc
PO Box 221 Grand Marais, MI 49839
phone: +1-906-494-2434
email: imcdonald@sharplabs.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Wagner,William [mailto:WWagner@NetSilicon.com]
Sent: Tuesday, May 04, 2004 10:43 AM
To: Harry Lewis; wbmm@pwg.org
Subject: RE: WBMM> Couple Questions about Schedules
Harry,
This brings up the question of addressing policy, one of the issues that remains outstanding in the current spec and one of the aspects in the responses to operations. We have touched on it in the emails.
Certainly, the agent or the managed entity operating though the agent must be able to reject certain actions. (I had not considered rejecting certain values, such as two frequent or too large... I think that is a bit more complicated). There was never any intent to negotiate a schedule. I think the last suggestion from Ira was that, in the case of an action that is prohibited with respect to a particular managed entity by site policy, the report dealing with that action would indicate that the action was disallowed. That is, the response to the schedule does not indicate that an action is disallowed. Rather, the report on the action would indicated that is is disallowed, just as it may indicate that the managed entity was down, or was unable to perform the action for some other reason..
If this were a recurring action, the recurring report would indicate it was disallowed. The management station, operating through the manager could then modify the schedule, but it does not need to. That is, there may be a generic schedule rather than a custom schedule developed for each managed entity.
We would need to consider whether we need to address agent rather than managed entity policies. That would address operations rather than actions. My first reaction is that this is not necessary since the Management Station is a trusted and authenticated manager. However, it is something worth discussing. The simple solution is that the agent sends reports according to it own limiting policy if the manager demands anything exceeding that limit. What would happen then is that the manger would report the agent for being non-responsive, and it would need to be dealt with outside the protocol. With respect to too many elements, I think any action must have a response. If the action is not performed, or all elements identified in the action are not acted on, then this should be in the report with a reason.
Bill Wagner
-----Original Message-----
From: Harry Lewis [mailto:harryl@us.ibm.com]
Sent: Tuesday, May 04, 2004 12:55 AM
To: wbmm@pwg.org
Subject: WBMM> Couple Questions about Schedules
Couple questions / observations from internal review
1. Is there a way to negotiate a schedule? What if the agent thinks the schedule is too frequent or the list of elements too large?
2. Can the agent refuse a schedule or a specific action in a schedule (ex. PurgeJobs)? Is there a way to indicate this?
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Harry Lewis
Chairman - IEEE-ISTO Printer Working Group
http://www.pwg.org
IBM Printing Systems
http://www.ibm.com/printers
303-924-5337
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