Subject: Re: CVS commit: src/sbin/ifconfig
To: None <tech-misc@netbsd.org>
From: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>
List: tech-misc
Date: 04/13/2003 16:16:29
Greg A. Woods <woods@weird.com> wrote on Sun, 13 Apr 2003
at 14:30:46 -0400 in <m194mFa-000B3kC@proven.weird.com>:

> SNMP is a many-to-many client/server protocol.  Not only is your idea
> not scalable, it also leads to the problem that each agent (client) ends
> up with its own unique view of what it thinks the kernel has actually
> done and it's way too easy for this view to get out of sync with reality
> (especially since SNMP is still very often used via unreliable datagrams).

This is grossly misleading.

It's hihghly unlikely that anyone is going to run more than one
SNMP agent on a given CPU that might look at the same set of kernel
counters. The many-to-one nature comes of having many snmp clients
querying that snmp agent over the network.

This is not to say that it is not a case to think about, but it is
hardly the common case.

--jhawk