Inbound DMI

The inbound DMI connection is available to the administrator of the root IVS in the IVE. The base license for the IVE will enable DMI Agent configuration option available.

Once the base license is installed, the DMI agent in the IVE can be configured in the DMI Agent page under the Configuration menu. The page can be used to configure both inbound and outbound DMI agent.

To enable the inbound DMI agent, the following needs to be configured:

•The network interface on which the inbound agent should be enabled

•The TCP port on which the inbound agent should accept connections

•The administrator realm to be used for authenticating the inbound DMI users

The TCP port needs to be a valid value between 1 and 65535 and it is important that the port configured is not used by any other process in the IVE. It is recommended that either the default value or a value higher than 1024 be used for the TCP port. The default choice for the interface is the internal interface and the default value for the TCP port is 830.

DMI uses SSH protocol for communication1. To connect to the IVE using inbound connection, the standard SSH shell2 can be used as the command line interface. For a better user experience, a simple client can be built around the standard SSH client. Since netconf protocol is used by DMI, while connecting to the IVE using inbound, the netconf channel needs to be specified as a parameter in the ssh command.

The following command invokes ssh to connect to the IVE’s inbound DMI agent

The -s parameter tells the ssh server to use the netconf channel for this connection. DMI relies on the Netconf protocol for managing device configurations.

After the user is authenticated, the IVE responds with “system:” capability string to the client. The SSH client displays this to the user. At this point, the user can execute RPC commands to configure, manage and get information from the IVE. The standard schema for the RPCs and the schema for the RPC-replies are elaborated in the DMI specification document.

To close the inbound session, close-session RPC can be used. More information about close-session RPC is available in section 7.8 of NETCONF Configuration Protocol RFC 4741: NETCONF Configuration Protocol