Re: SOAP/HTTP over SSH

[Juergen Schoenwaelder <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Jun 01, 2006 at 06:07:48PM +0530, Pooja Malhotra wrote:
 
> We are planning to implement NetConf.And I am very new to this standard.
> In this effort I went thro' the initial draft
> "NETCONF Configuration Protocol draft-ietf-netconf-prot-12" proposed by
> IETF.
> After going through it , I understood the architecture
> as shown below in the figure:
> 
> 
>       Layer                      Example
>          +-------------+      +-----------------------------+
>      (4) |   Content   |      |     Configuration data      |
>          +-------------+      +-----------------------------+
>                 |                           |
>          +-------------+      +-----------------------------+
>      (3) | Operations  |      | NETCONF operation		|
>          +-------------+      +-----------------------------+
>                 |                           |
>          +-------------+      +-----------------------------+
>      (2) |     RPC     |      |   SOAP over HTTP    		|
>          +-------------+      +-----------------------------+
>                 |                           |
>          +-------------+      +-----------------------------+
>      (1) |  Transport  |      |  SSH                        |
>          |   Protocol  |      |                             |
>          +-------------+  	+-----------------------------+

It might help if you actually look at the figure contained in the
draft you are citing since the one above is not correct. It figure in
the draft looks like this:

              Layer                      Example
         +-------------+      +-----------------------------+
     (4) |   Content   |      |     Configuration data      |
         +-------------+      +-----------------------------+
                |                           |
         +-------------+      +-----------------------------+
     (3) | Operations  |      | <get-config>, <edit-config> |
         +-------------+      +-----------------------------+
                |                           |
         +-------------+      +-----------------------------+
     (2) |     RPC     |      |    <rpc>, <rpc-reply>       |
         +-------------+      +-----------------------------+
                |                           |
         +-------------+      +-----------------------------+
     (1) |  Transport  |      |   BEEP, SSH, SSL, console   |
         |   Protocol  |      |                             |
         +-------------+      +-----------------------------+

The RPC layer is netconf's RPC mechanism and not SOAP/HTTP. If you run
NETCONF over SSH, there is no SOAP or HTTP involved at all.

> What is the nature of the SSH connection?Is it socket connection
> like SSL?

SSH provides your application with so called channels where each
channel realizes a data stream interface (much like a TCP socket if
you like).
 
> Also Is it mandatory to implement SSH. Instead can we use SOAP
> over HTTPS.

I think the wording in the document is rather clear:

: 2.4.  Mandatory Transport Protocol
:
:   A NETCONF implementation MUST support the SSH transport protocol
:   mapping [4].

Sure, you can choose to not support the SSH transport. But then you
can't claim to be compliant.

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder		    International University Bremen
<http://www.eecs.iu-bremen.de/>	    P.O. Box 750 561, 28725 Bremen, Germany

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