[AGENT++] Proposal: Explicit save of persistent objects via SNMP

[Henning Eggers]

> First I thought, it could be a valuable
> feature to be able to specify which parts of the agent's MIB to store
> where. But the more I think about it, the more I doubt that this
> is really useful. What do you think?

You are probably right to doubt that. When I think about it, in everyday
life I would probably always save all persistent objects and not bother to
think "Well, which part did I change that needs saving now?". Consider
router configurations. I always do a "copy run start" on my Ciscos and never
wonder which part I want to save, even if IOS provided that feature (does
it?).
It was just me playing with this in my  mind but it is not a feature I would
need.

For debugging purposes it would be cool, though, to be able to save multiple
copies of the configuration. A simple backup feature might do the job:
Always copy the old configuration to a fixed backup location before saving
the new one. Then the user could choose to restore the old version if the
new version does not work. This mechanism would replace my proposed writable
object for the configuration directory.

> Another option would be to schedule configuration storage. Probably,
> storing the configuration each hour or each night could be useful,
> couldn't it?
No, I do not see why. The only time I need to save the configuration is when
I changed it. This would imply that the configuration might be changed
constantly which I cannot find a sensible situation for. Well, thinking
about it: there may be such things as "dynamic trap receivers" which change
because the admin always starts the NMS on different machines. But does that
really happen?

Keep thinking ;-)

Regards,
Henning