On Thursday, 02/26/2004 at 11:23 EST, David Boyes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:

> Well, for this task you also had SNMP, which is far more standard for
setting
> and reading system control information than RPC and would have gotten
you
> immediate support from the current major system management tools, but
that's
> water under the bridge now. SNMP doesn't depend on smoking any of that
web
> services stuff, and at least there are simple (did I actually use simple
and
> SNMP in the same sentence?) line-mode clients for SNMP...8-)  But, long
term,
> the SOAP/XML thing and-or CIM is probably the near-term horizon. Maybe
it'd
> be better to do that anyway -- Brian Wade's excellent RSK-based WWW
server
> would make a really nice starting point.

It's all politics.  The Distributed Management Task Force (dmtf.org),
which is composed of companies like IBM, Dell, HP, Sun, Intel, and others,
has taken responsibility for formulating and promoting system management
standards.  As you say, that is the Common Information Model (CIM).   I
agree with the DMTF, though, that SNMP really isn't up to the challenge -
there is no way to dynamically add MIBs and manage the authorizations for
them, and there is no way for the client to discover new MIBs.
Fortunately, the DMTF was not ignorant of SNMP and made room for it within
the CIM context.

The web server is only interesting if it supports SSL.  Even better if
that SSL supports the PCICA card and the z990 encryption assists.  Linux
on zSeries has it.  No point in reinventing the wheel.

Alan Altmark
Sr. Software Engineer
IBM z/VM Development

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