This is a fairly high-level review, but I do have two substantive comments:

I see a glaring omission in section 5... Security.
I see that the security considerations hint at this, but I think we need at 
least a placeholder here to underscore its relative importance. Here's a crack 
at some text...

Secure: The communication both between applications and I2RS client and between 
I2RS client and I2RS agent (and others?) should use secure (authenticated and 
encrypted) transport. Further, a fine-grained trust model should be defined to 
ensure that the payload communications (both read-only and read-write access) 
are properly authenticated (you are who you say you are and I trust you to 
communicate with me), and to give tight control over what a given communicator 
is and is not permitted to know or manipulate. These controls should include 
the ability to limit the manipulation to a range of acceptable values or even 
limit the rate of change. IOW - if the knob goes from 0 to 11, but I only want 
to allow application X to be able to turn it between 2 and 5, the framework 
needs to support that.

Given the amount of control possible with I2RS or other SDN-style control 
surfaces, security and trust model for any of these software manipulation tools 
MUST be designed in from day one. Bolt-on security (that is, security that is 
not integral to the protocol specification) has the potential to sharply limit 
the application of these tools because it would require a level of trust and 
coordination between those maintaining applications and those maintaining the 
routing network that simply does not exist today in most companies.

Section 6 - there are XML interfaces to some router OSes now. You may have 
intended this to be covered under CLI, since it shares similarities, but when 
we're talking about existing interfaces and protocols, that might be an 
important distinction.
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/ios_xr_sw/iosxr_r4.1/xml/programming/guide/xl41apidoc.html


Thanks,

Wes George


> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of
> Alia Atlas
> Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2013 5:51 PM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: [i2rs] updated draft-atlas-i2rs-problem-statement-01
>
> I updated the problem-statement draft, but requested manual posting to
> get the name-change and meta-data right.
> While waiting for that to happen, I've attached the draft so there's
> more time to review it before IETF.
>
> Regards,
> Alia

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