This is only a rough draft - Megan 04/20/92 Minutes of the Host Resources MIB BOF San Diego, March 16, 1992 Steven Waldbusser, Chair Agenda Introduce charter and mailing list Discuss goals Identify resources Plan for future work Straw Proposal The charter for the BOF was introduced: _________________________________________________________________________ Host Resources MIB BOF The purpose of the BOF will be to explore interest in consolidating existing private vendor MIBs for SNMP that instrument computer hosts. Such instrumentation represents non-network specific information such as operational state and hardware and software configuration information. This BOF will attempt to outline a plan for future activity in this area. Because the internet comprises a wide variety of workstation types, discussion will not be confined to workstations that run Unix. The goal of such an activity would be to improve interoperability in the Internet environment by consolidating the large number of SNMP SMI based objects have been and are being created by a number of vendors in this area. Some attempt will be made to identify those areas of existing workstation instrumentation in which the desire for commonality is most urgently felt. _________________________________________________________________________ In addition, the mailing list was announced: hostmib@andrew.cmu.edu. Please send add/remove requests to hostmib-request@andrew.cmu.edu. ----------- The group then began discussing the goals for this effort. Several goals outlined in the charter were reiterated: Goal #1: Improve interoperability by consolidating existing vendor MIBs. Goal #2: Any objects should be common across platforms (e.g. Unix, PC, Mac). Goal #3: Identify the most urgent areas and solve them quickly. Goal #3, the desire for timeliness, was felt rather strongly by the group. A discussion then ensued to attempt to identify the scope of this process. It was noted that there are many problems to solve, some of which are very complex, and others which are more general in nature than instrumentation of hosts. It was also unclear what comprises a host, but it was noted that focusing on "personal computers" or "workstations" was most important and makes it much easier to find commonality. It was proposed that the most important instrumentation would cover: operational state/performance Hardware configuration Software configuration Furthermore, the focus would be on the following parts of a "host": CPU, memory, disk, devices, and software (OS, drivers, applications). The group agreed that a model should be prepared to support this work. ---------- The group then began identifying resources for this work. Many existing MIBs (and related specs) were identified including: Character MIB Unix MIB (Marshall Rose) Unix MIB (UTK) Unix MIB (U. of Colorado) Apple System MIB Unix MIB (HP) Unix MIB (Dec) Microcom LanLord Racal Interlan Unix MIB (Posix) Netware 3rd party Lan inventory products In addition, in order to judge if there was sufficient interest in moving forward with this work, a show of hands was conducted as to who would participate in a Host Resource MIB Working Group, if formed. A significant number of people (>30) indicated that they would participate. ----------- The group achieved consensus on the following plans for the future: Charter a working group (action item: Waldbusser) Define a Model Write a MIB ---------- In the remaining time, a straw proposal was outlined by Pete Grillo. This proposal defined a model and a MIB that instrumented common objects for "Desktop" hosts. At the end of this presentation, our time was up and the meeting was adjourned.