support for new work

Hi,

This email is intended to state my opinion on the new work proposals
made to the EOS WG, because the WG Chair is trying to gauge consensus,
and silence means no opinion.

MIB proposals:  I do not think any of the various MIB proposals
should be pursued by this WG. 

OID optimizations: I favor protocol mechanisms for OID compression
and suppression, because this would be a generalized solution.
I do not support any solution which relies on opaque, packed 
OCTET STRINGs to achieve these goals, because an engine would
not be able to generically unpack the data. There are also
issues with holes in rows and MIB versioning that make this approach
undesirable.

Protocol Operations: I support Wes Hardaker's proposal,
Object Oriented PDUs for SNMP. There are a lot of details
to work out, but it looks promising for supporting SMIv3
hierarchical data structures, as well as addressing some
current inefficiencies in the protocol.  

Backward and Forward Compatibility: I think new features should only 
be supported in new protocol operations because this allows
the most flexibility to do proper design. Retrofitting existing
protocol operations with new features will result in hacks,
and create more implementation complexity than it solves.
Old protocol operations should continue to be supported,
exactly as currently defined.

Transport: This new protocol version (with object oriented 
protocol operations) should be run over UDP or TCP.  No
complex hacks should be added to support large PDU fragmentation
if UDP is used. Large PDUs should only be supported over TCP.
Session based features (e.g., security, compression) should
be considered for the TCP version.

Andy