Y'all -- After some thought on the entire ownership and subscription issue raised yesterday in the WG meeting -- to repeat the problem for those who weren't there... If an application/controller installs state into a particular agent running on a particular network node, what should we do with the notifications, etc.? Should the agent maintain some sort of "ownership" of the item in some way, so the agent can notify the owner/installer when their information is overwritten? Or should such notifications simply be pub/sub, where anyone (including the owner) can subscribe to changes in the item?
I actually think the answer is both... IMHO, the agent should maintain a "who installed this" set of bits, but do nothing with these bits other than maintain them and include them in any notifications. These "bits" don't need to be anything complicated -- any sort of nonce would do, somehow calculated so there is little chance of the bits being replicated between controllers (a problem to be solved later, probably, or outside the confines of the protocol definition). My thinking is this -- when something is installed in the local ephemeral state by the agent, then the process might look like -- 1. The install signal is received 2. The priorities are examined, and the specific state installed 3. The installer is automatically subscribed to the notifications (the installer can decide to be removed from the pub/sub, but subscription should be on by default) 4. If the installer's state is overwritten, it receives a notification 5. This notification contains the "owner bits," which is really just shorthand for the installer to quickly check to see if "I installed this" Local policy in the controller might use this information in different ways. It's really just a bit of shorthand to help the controllers process things more efficiently, rather than real "ownership bits" in the more traditional sense. This seems like it solves the problems at hand -- ownership only implies subscription because the subscribe happens by default, but it's not really attached to the "ownership bits." It also, however, provides a shortcut for the "owner" to know what's going on with "their" installed state. Thoughts? :-) Russ _______________________________________________ i2rs mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/i2rs
