Re: agent X's role

Dave Shield <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.network.net-snmp.user
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Wed, 2005-11-09 at 16:53 +0000, Guillaume Desticourt wrote:
> i did not really understood the interest of AgentX when
> developping a subagent.
> what can we do with agent X that you cannot with SNMP?

There are two main problems with using SNMP directly
as a subagent extension approach.


> let say i have a midlevel manager which sends (forward) snmp
> get to subagent. 

First question - how does the midlevel manager know to send
requests to that subagent?
  SNMP is basically driven from the requesting side, so the
midlevel manager would typically have to be manually configured
to know about this new subagent.

  AgentX supports dynamic registration - the subagent could
connect to the master agent, and offer to support a new
area of the OID tree.


> these "get" can be made with snmp, so why should i send
> them with the agent X protocol?

The other main advantage with AgentX is nothing to do with
GET (or GETNEXT) requests.  What happens if you have a *SET*
request, that needs to be split over two or more proxied
subagents?  In particular, what happens when one of the
proxied SET requests fails?

Remember that SET processing should be all-or-nothing.
If one half of the SET request fails, then the other
half shouldn't be applied either.   But that's not
really possible with straight SNMP-based subagents
AgentX support a multi-pass SET processing model, so
can handle multiple validation, update and undo passes.
It's not quite the same as the Net-SNMP internal SET
processing model, but it's fairly close.


Make sense?

Dave


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