Re: Re: Draft-iet-bridge-bridgemib-smiv2-09.txt

On Fri, Jan 28, 2005 at 08:26:11AM -0500, David B Harrington wrote:
 
> But we have competing interests. You and Bert want to get rid of
> references to RFC1213. Mike wants to get rid of inaccurate statements
> about relationships to other mibs. I would like to keep the RFC1213
> reference because compatibility with RFC1493 has been the primary
> goal, but unless others in the WG speak up and say that such
> compliance is the consensus and that RFC1213 is fine, as co-chair, I
> need to try to adjudicate the competing consensuses.

I don't think RFC1213 is the issue. The confusion I think is more on
the interpretation of the following paragraph:

   In MIB-II, the 'system' group is defined as being mandatory for all
   systems such that each managed entity contains one instance of each
   object in the 'system' group.  Thus, those objects apply to the
   entity as a whole irrespective of whether the entity's sole
   functionality is bridging, or whether bridging is only a subset of
   the entity's functionality.

I think it is clear what 'system' group in RFC1213 stands for. What is
less clear is whether the text conveys a requirement that the 'system'
group in RFC1213 is mandatory to implement for bridges. The other
interpretation I have heard is that only the sys* objects listed in
section 3.1 are mandatory if you want to comply to the IEEE 802.1d
definition while the BRIDGE-MIB does not require any of them to be
implemented. This is what I tried to capture in my latest proposal.

Once we agree what RFC 1493 section 3.2 really wants to say, we should
be able to phrase that same thing in terms of the SNMPv2-MIB and the
IF-MIB. I have posted two concrete proposals trying to cover the two
interpretations I have identified above. I am happy with either one.
If both don't work, someone should post another one and then we need 
to determine concensus which one is the correct one to choose.

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder		    International University Bremen
<http://www.eecs.iu-bremen.de/>	    P.O. Box 750 561, 28725 Bremen, Germany