Using NETCONF over the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)

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RFC 4743                   NETCONF over SOAP               December 2006


   HTTP caches SHOULD NOT be inserted between NETCONF managers and
   agents as NETCONF session state is tied to the state of the
   underlying transport connection.  Three defensive actions can be
   taken:

   o  Caching MUST be prohibited through the use of HTTP headers Cache-
      Control and Pragma: no-cache.

   o  HTTP proxies SHOULD NOT be deployed within the management network.

   o  Use HTTPS.

   It is also possible to respond to the concern on the reuse of port
   80.  Any NETCONF SOAP service MUST always be supported over the new
   standard port for NETCONF over SOAP, and all conforming
   implementations MUST default to attempting connections over this new
   standard port for NETCONF.  A standard port for NETCONF over SOAP
   (over HTTP) has been assigned in the IANA considerations of this
   document.

2.5.  Important HTTP 1.1 Features

   HTTP 1.1 [5] includes two important features that provide for
   relatively efficient transport of SOAP messages.  These features are
   "persistent connections" and "chunked transfer-coding".

   Persistent connections allow a single TCP connection to be used
   across multiple HTTP requests.  This permits multiple SOAP request/
   response message pairs to be exchanged without the overhead of
   creating a new TCP connection for each request.  Given that a single
   stream is used for both requests and responses, it is clear that some
   form of framing is necessary.  For messages whose length is known in
   advance, this is handled by the HTTP header "Content-length".  For
   messages of dynamic length, "Chunking" is required.

   HTTP "Chunking" or "chunked transfer-coding" allows the sender to
   send an indefinite amount of binary data.  This is accomplished by
   informing the receiver of the size of each "chunk" (substring of the
   data) before the chunk is transmitted.  The last chunk is indicated
   by a chunk of zero length.  Chunking can be effectively used to
   transfer a large XML document where the document is generated on-line
   from a non-XML form in memory.

   In terms of its application to SOAP message exchanges, persistent
   connections are clearly important for performance reasons and are
   particularly important when the persistence of authenticated
   connections is at stake.  When one considers that messages of dynamic
   length are the rule rather than the exception for SOAP messages, it



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