Hi everyone,

A few of us are just trying to put out an initial draft that addresses one gap 
in MUD (there are several).  In a MUD file one can say that one wants to access 
a controller in two ways: either "my-controller” meaning a controller that 
services devices of a particular MUD URL or a “controller” class that services 
devices based on a particular class name of controller.

In either case, right now the administrator has to manually know and populate 
information, to say - some device 1.2.3.4 is a controller, either for MUD URL 
https://example.com/mud <https://example.com/mud> or a class 
http://example.com/mudclass1 <http://example.com/mudclass1>.  That can be 
laborious.  To assist, we are examining ways to have a controller declare 
itself as a candidate controller.  That at least provides a hint to the 
administrator that this particular device is capable of serving in a particular 
role.

To make that declaration, the device must-
Form the declaration;
Find the MUD manager; and
Send it.

Forming the declaration is easy: we can make this a YANG grouping and then 
place it in various spots.

Finding the MUD manager depends on one question:
Was the device built to be a controller or is it a general purpose device that 
has an app that is intended to be a controller?

If the device was built to be a controller, we can simply cram the declaration 
into that devices own MUD file as an extension.  If the device is a general 
purpose computer, things get a bit more interesting.  In this case we have two 
choices:

Either create a MUD file that points somewhere internally - this doesn’t seem 
very plug and play.
Make the declaration directly to the MUD manager.

I’m going to focus on the latter for the moment.  It is easy enough to create a 
RESTful interface for this purpose, but it requires a mechanism to discovered 
the MUD manager, which up until now has been an internal part of the network 
infrastructure.

Let me call this out plainly: letting the app itself directly call the MUD 
manager requires that the MUD manager itself become exposed to the user 
infrastructure, which is a change.

One possibility to address this is to incorporate the new RESTful endpoint into 
an ANIMA BRSKI join registrar, which may already be exposed.  But that requires 
that ANIMA BRSKI be in play, which it may not.

My thinking is that we do this work in two stages.  First handle the easy case, 
which is the MUD file extension, and then figure out how to do the app version 
of this.

Thoughts?

Eliot

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