HTML Version available at Minutes of the HTTP MIB BOF Monday, March 4, 1996 35th IETF, Los Angeles Carl Kalbfleisch presented the status of the work on the MIB to date. A Summary of Carl's talk is included below*. The most current MIB may be found at http://http-mib.onramp.net/draft_2.my There was a great deal of discussion and some confusion over the purpose and requirements for this MIB. Regarding the customer/user requirements for the MIB ... We were fortunate to have representatives from the Centre for Earth Observation (CEO) in Europe at the BOF. (More information is included below**). These individuals, Rui Meneses and Dirk Vangulik, are participating in CEO related projects for enabling the use and access to EO information and data (satellite pictures) across multiple locations in Europe. Rui Meneses deals in particular with projects related with management of distributed information services, both within the CEO project and the DESIRE project (http://www.surfnet.nl/surfnet/projects/desire), where a survey questionnaire will be published on line at http://www.netmode.ntua/gr/musiq, aiming at assessing the requirements of end-users, IS providers, and developers on distributed IS management. The results of this questionnaire could be used to draft the requirements document and interested parties are encouraged to review the draft questionnaires at the following location http://www.netmode.ntua.gr/musiq/final.html An unfortunate discovery at the BOF was that most attendees had their own set of requirements. Most of the BOF time was devoted to defining and explaining why it is necessary to manage web servers, and what is required. The conclusion at the end of the BOF was to put together a charter, goals, and set of requirements for a WEB Server Management MIB Working Group, and to investigate other working groups to determine areas of overlap (specifically MADMAN and applicationMIB). NEW TITLE: Web Server Management MIB (includes proxy and client) PURPOSE: Provide a consistent method for managing heterogeneous web servers in medium to large enterprises. USERS AND CUSTOMERS: * Internet Service Providers managing their networks and their customers' web pages on web servers in those networks * End users managing large networks of web servers * Producers of specialized web servers * Network managers already using SNMP to manage their networks and who now want to extend this capability to manage web servers REQUIREMENTS: Web server management may be divided into three areas: (1) Tracking specific activity in the web server -Error generating and reporting -Capacity planning -Quality of service (in real time) -"Log Digester" (2) Retrieval services -- an abstraction decoupling the information space from the underlying transport mechanism (3) Document information store -- managing documents and their dependencies among applications Most of the discussion in the meeting revolved around the first item: Tracking Specific Activity in the Web Server 1. Is my server saturated? How many user/connections were refused? What were the 500-level errors? 2. How long is it taking the server to respond? How many queues? holding time? connection handling characteristics? 3. Real time versus after the fact errors. Real time implies the quality of service, i.e. being able to respond to a consistent set of problems rapidly. 4. After-the-fact or "logged" errors Is the current log data satisfactory for this? The log file mechanism found in most web server software packages contains too much data in a format that is difficult to use for SNMP management. A summary of this data is required. 5. Counting page hits (use a table, not a log file). 6. Manage configuration? 7. Manage performance? Threads management was discussed. How is this resource utilized (almost full, 50%, little)? Check the current active incoming and outgoing threads (connections) and compare them with max-threads-allowed and min-threads allowed. How to affect this resource utilization (by changing the allowed boundaries - setting max-threads-allowed and/or min-threads-allowed to different values). *Summary of Carl Kalbfleisch's Presentation at the BOF in Los Angeles, March 4, 1996. -------------------------------------- HTTP-MIB Background -------------------------------------- * September 1995 o I Started at OnRamp Technologies. o Looked for information on SNMP management of Web servers. o Found Management of a WWW server using SNMP, by Carlos Picoto and Pedro Veiga. o No standard efforts underway. * October 1995 o half a dozen folks expressed interest from various email list and USENET posts o http-mib@onramp.net mailing list started * November 1995 o Created first draft of a MIB o There are at least two implementations based on this draft * December 1995 o Discuss draft o not on agenda for Dallas IETF * January 1996 o Created second draft of a MIB o Extends MADMAN efforts o Documents several threads from mailing list * February 1995 o Preliminary work on document tables o Preliminary work on access and other errors o discussion on timeouts * March 1996 o BOF at LA IETF Meeting ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Last Update: March 1, 1996 Carl W. Kalbfleisch cwk@onramp.net =================================================================== **The CEO project has implemented a set of three MIBs to allow management of WEB based Information Service: (1) Information Store MIB (2) Retrieval Services MIB (3) http MIB -- this latter in strong collaboration with the work developed at the http-MIB mailing list (through Harrie Hazewinkel, Mark Gamble, and Erik van Hengstum) Information related to these MIBs can be found at (location will change): http://case.cs.utwente.nl:1234/ISMIB.asn1 http://case.cs.utwente.nl:1234/RSMIB.asn1 http://case.cs.utwente.nl:1234/HTTPMIB.asn1