Re: server-to-server protocols

[Erikas Aras Napjus <[e-mail]>]

> Reuse of technology is a good thing, as long as we don't make the
> mistake of trying to reuse technology just for the sake of reusing it.
> We should not reuse it just because it's possible to - we should reuse
> it because it is the right thing to do.  In this case, as far as I can
> see all that using SNMP as a transport for the Interserver Protocol
> would do would be to needlessly complicate the Interserver Protocol.

I guess I don't see where implementing a new, untested protocol can be
significantly better than using something that's been in production use
for years, has been implemented by most of the major vendors (at least
in other products), and has extensive existing libraries that can be
reused. (For CMU's DHCP server, we stole most of the SNMP code from the
MBONE SNMP agent, for example.) SNMP certainly isn't simple, but it's
also not very complex, particularly when the reference implementations
and libraries are already available.

With that said, I'm not going to beat a dying horse over this, either.
If we want to develop something from scratch or use a protocol that's
under development in another area, it's not unreasonable. I just don't
see why SNMP isn't a reasonable answer to the problem.

--- Erikas