RFC 1023 (rfc1023) - Page 1 of 17
HEMS monitoring and control language
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
Network Working Group G. Trewitt
Request for Comments: 1023 Stanford
C. Partridge
BBN/NNSC
October 1987
HEMS Monitoring and Control Language
This RFC specifies the design of a general-purpose, yet efficient,
monitoring and control language for managing network entities. The
data in the entity is modeled as a hierarchy and specific items are
named by giving the path from the root of the tree. Most items are
read-only, but some can be "set" in order to perform control
operations. Both requests and responses are represented using the
ISO ASN.1 data encoding rules.
STATUS OF THIS MEMO
The purpose of this RFC is provide a specification for monitoring and
control of network entities in the Internet. This is an experimental
specification and is intended for use in testing the ideas presented
here. No proposals in this memo are intended as standards for the
Internet at this time. After sufficient experimentation and
discussion, this RFC will be redrafted, perhaps as a standard.
Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
This language is a component of the High-Level Entity Monitoring
System (HEMS) described in RFC-1021 and RFC-1022. Readers may want
to consult these RFCs when reading this memo. RFC-1024 contains
detailed assignments of numbers and structures used in this system.
This memo assumes a knowledge of the ISO data encoding standard,
ASN.1.
OVERVIEW AND SCOPE
The basic model of monitoring and control used in this proposal is
that a query is sent to a monitored entity and the entity sends back
a response. The term query is used in the database sense -- it may
request information, modify things, or both. We will use gateway-
oriented examples, but it should be understood that this query-
response mechanism can be applied to other entities besides just
gateways.
In particular, there is no notion of an interactive "conversation" as
in SMTP [RFC-821] or FTP [RFC-959]. A query is a complete request
that stands on its own and elicits a complete response.
Trewitt & Partridge