cheriton@PESCADERO.STANFORD.EDU.UUCP (01/21/87)
Responding in part to Dennis's question, it seems appropriate to me to view security as a transport-level functionality (unless the security demands are extreme and application-specific). Thus, I would like to broaden his question slightly to: What is the currently thinking by those involved on the provision of transport functionality for a monitoring protocol. This includes: transport-level addressing, error control and sequencing, flow control and security. My opinion: gateways are a service or server in the distributed systems sense. We should be able to contact this service using a standard RPC-like protocol suite, at least for monitoring and control. Only gateway-specific "procedures" need to be specialized, not the transport and presentation levels. Getting there: Bob Braden's end-to-end task force is looking at various candidates for a "transaction protocol" (see RFC 955). There has also been some discussion of presentation-level protocols. (I have a candidate protocol, VMTP, responding to RFC 955 which I hope to RFC in the near future.) It would be helpful for the monitoring protocol people to think in terms of this protocol structure or else indicate why this approach is unworkable. Otherwise, we may have an explosion of higher-level and management protocols, all solving the transport and presentation levels issues differently. David C.
gross@MITRE-GATEWAY.ARPA (Phil Gross) (01/22/87)
I agree with Dave. I sent a note to the new gwmon mailing list expressing some of the same concerns. (I won't clutter mailboxes by including it here.) Perhaps, we should move the discussion to that list? Phill