>
>[ Well, you brought up the CORBA topic so I will shoot now. ;-) ]
>
>The last point is very important for me: Our networks and our (UNIX)
>systems usually look very different from site to site - a result of
>the open market. (Windows environments don't have this huge number of
>differences that UNIX environments have.) Hence I consider it very
>important to build a system that invites people to make modifications
>and enhancements. Scripting is one way to get this flexibility. CORBA
>does not help here.
>
I couldn't agree more. One of the reasons that I really like tkined/scotty
is because it doesn't have the extra cruft (not that I'm calling CORBA
cruft). I like its flexibility and extensibility via C/C++. We have
free use of Sun NetManager, and yet I use tkined. Why? For the reasons
above. Perhaps it will be a detriment to tkined/scotty becoming a
world class enterprise network management system (whatever that means),
but I really like the fact that you can just load another module (via
Tcl) if you need to and add your own extensions if you want without having
to have all kinds of extra things that would probably take a lot of memory
and result in bloat.
For the record: I don't know of CORBA fits this description. If CORBA
could be made a dynamically loadable extension, then I'd say yes. If
CORBA requires irrevocably changing the tkined/scotty core and merging
it in, I'd have to be convinced this was a good thing.
>> a) It's object oriented and offers implementation in different
>> languages. It should not be hard to include Tcl, in doubt via the C
>> interfaces of both CORBA and Tcl. Is there a language binding for
>> Tcl? In preparation?
>
>Why does object-orientation help to solve the problem? Yes, I know the
>benefits of object-orientation. But are these benefits critical for
>successful system or network management or just an implementation
>issue? (You should not mention it as the first argument if its an
>implementation issue.)
>
Aside: object orientation with multiple inheritance is available easily
by loading the itcl or stooop modules. I've done this on several projects
and it works well.
>Many organizations consider some technology important at some point in
>time and a few years later something completely different has taken
>over the whole scene. Do you remember what people and organizations
>told us about DME a few years ago?
>
DME.. Oh yeah.. It was 'the thing' to kill all other things in enterprise
management. It was the SNMP killer. What a fiasco.
-- ____________________________________________________________________________ Doug Hughes Engineering Network Services System/Net Admin Auburn University doug@eng.auburn.edu