Abdella Battou writes:
Abdella> some relevant links on this subject: Abdella> www.trl.ibm.com/projects/xml/xss4j/docs/axt-readme.html Abdella> cheers, Abdella
Let us not confuse the SNMP data definition language and the SNMP protocol.
The SNMP protocol is indeed a proper application of ASN.1 and you can of course replace the BER encoding with an XML encoding. It is probably a matter of taste whether this makes sense or not. XML encodings certainly won't be much smaller and given the message size constraints of SNMP over UDP (the default transport mapping), one can make arguments that this does not buy us than much.
The SMI data definition language is not pure ASN.1 - it is an extended subset. The smidump -f xml output is consistent with the concepts of the SMI language and I doubt that using a generic ASN.1 to XML translator would produce reasonable results. (If it is a correct ASN.1 implementation, it won't be able to parse the input and stop.)
The smidump -f xml output is really intended to allow programs which need access to SMI definitions and which already have XML parsers but no SMI parsers can get access to what they need easily. Many exiting commercial tools read intermediate file formats such as the mosy format which is nowhere really defined. The smidump -f xml output was intended to replace this immediate format with a well defined XML format.
Recently, Torsten Klie has written the smidump -f xsl output format which produces an XML schema derived from the MIB modules. This translation happens at the data definition / schema layer which allows to encode management information in XML according to the generated schema. In case people see benefits in replacing the BER encoding of SNMP, using the schemas to derive XML encodings is IMHO much more useful than just replacing BER with XER. But again, we have many SNMP protocol implementations these days that interoperate at the protocol level and the question remains to be answered whether changing the protocol really improves the way we manage networks.
For me, the real dilemma is not really a technology issue. Right now, I am trying to write an application which can create port based VLANs on various bridges and so far I have had to implement 3 different ways to do this for bridges from 3 different vendors. So the real problem I have is that the good stuff is in proprietary data definitions and I doubt that changing the protocols or data definition languages to use XML will improve this situation in any way.
/js