[j-nsp] email from commit or op script?

[Ross Vandegrift]

On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 01:56:19AM -0600, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:
> If you really stop and think about it, email is the perfect choice for
> event notification both from router-generated events and op scripts.
> Even the client implementation is pretty darn simple compared to all the
> fancy modern protocols people love to churn out, just a simple ssmtp
> style tcp session to port 25 to hand off the data to a real mail server. 

If that's all you do, then you have a server anyway - so just have the
server turn the syslog message or SNMP trap into an email.

The reason I think these are preferable is that they are completely
one shot - the router kicks it off and forgets about it.  If you used
SMTP, there'd be a quite reasonable expectation that mail should be
queued if something goes wrong with delivery.  If you don't queue the
mail in the case of an error, what was the point of using SMTP?

The only answer I can see to that question - a config diff doesn't
necessarily fit into syslog or SNMP traps.  That's fair, but JUNOS can
resolve that in other ways: fix the archive-on-commit feature so it's
more flexible.  In particular, what you really want for this is the
ability to have the router commit the new config to local version
control and have the option to push a sequence of changes to a remote
branch.

There's now tons of free distributed version control systems that
would trivially support this.  First one to port git to the MX and EX
wins a case of beer from me :)

-- 
Ross Vandegrift
ross at kallisti.us

"If the fight gets hot, the songs get hotter.  If the going gets tough,
the songs get tougher."
	--Woody Guthrie
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <https://puck.nether.net/pipermail/juniper-nsp/attachments/20100217/f09b151b/attachment.bin>