Experience of Implementing NETCONF over SOAP
RFC 5381

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Network Working Group                                          T. Iijima
Request for Comments: 5381                                   Y. Atarashi
Category: Informational                                        H. Kimura
                                                               M. Kitani
                                                  Alaxala Networks Corp.
                                                                H. Okita
                                                           Hitachi, Ltd.
                                                            October 2008

              Experience of Implementing NETCONF over SOAP

Status of This Memo

   This memo provides information for the Internet community.  It does
   not specify an Internet standard of any kind.  Distribution of this
   memo is unlimited.

IESG Note

   This document discusses implementation experience of NETCONF over
   SOAP.  Note that Section 2.4 of RFC 4741 states, "A NETCONF
   implementation MUST support the SSH transport protocol mapping".
   Therefore, a NETCONF implementation that only supports the SOAP
   transport described in this document and not (at least) also SSH is
   not in compliance with the NETCONF standards.

Abstract

   This document describes how the authors developed a SOAP (Simple
   Object Access Protocol)-based NETCONF (Network Configuration
   Protocol) client and server.  It describes an alternative SOAP
   binding for NETCONF that does not interoperate with an RFC 4743
   conformant implementation making use of cookies on top of the
   persistent transport connections of HTTP.  When SOAP is used as a
   transport protocol for NETCONF, various kinds of development tools
   are available.  By making full use of these tools, developers can
   significantly reduce their workload.  The authors developed an NMS
   (Network Management System) and network equipment that can deal with
   NETCONF messages sent over SOAP.  This document aims to provide
   NETCONF development guidelines gained from the experience of
   implementing a SOAP-based NETCONF client and server.

Iijima, et al.               Informational                      [Page 1]
RFC 5381        Experience of Implementing NETCONF/SOAP     October 2008

Table of Contents

   1. Introduction ....................................................3
      1.1. NETCONF over SOAP ..........................................3
      1.2. Motivation .................................................3
   2. NETCONF Development on Web Services Framework ...................4
      2.1. WSDL as an Interface Description Language ..................5
      2.2. Generation of APIs .........................................5
   3. Architecture of the NETCONF over SOAP Implementation ............5
      3.1. SOAP Implementation in NMS .................................6
           3.1.1. SOAP Parser in NMS ..................................7
           3.1.2. Session Maintenance in NMS ..........................7
      3.2. SOAP Implementation in the Network Equipment ...............8
           3.2.1. SOAP Parser in the Network Equipment ................8
           3.2.2. Session Maintenance in the Network Equipment ........8
   4. Guidelines for Developing NETCONF Clients and Servers ...........8
      4.1. Procedures of Development of NETCONF Clients ...............9
           4.1.1. Developing NETCONF Clients without Eclipse .........10
           4.1.2. Developing NETCONF Clients Using Eclipse ...........11
      4.2. Procedures of Development of NETCONF Servers ..............13
           4.2.1. Developing NETCONF Servers without Eclipse .........14
           4.2.2. Developing NETCONF Servers Using Eclipse ...........15
           4.2.3. Developing NETCONF Servers with C
                  Programming Language ...............................18
   5. Security Considerations ........................................18
   6. Acknowledgements ...............................................18
   7. References .....................................................19
      7.1. Normative References ......................................19
      7.2. Informative References ....................................19

Iijima, et al.               Informational                      [Page 2]
RFC 5381        Experience of Implementing NETCONF/SOAP     October 2008

1.  Introduction

1.1.  NETCONF over SOAP

   This document is not a product from the NETCONF WG but a report on
   the experience acquired by individual developers.

   SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) was specified in [RFC4743] as
   one of the transport protocols for NETCONF.  It is designed to use
   XML (eXtensible Markup Language) as its description language, which
   is a fundamental messaging technology for Web Services.  For this
   reason, SOAP is well suited to the NETCONF protocol and can be
   deployed widely.

   To develop a SOAP-based NETCONF client and server, several