Re: MIDCOM MIB design question

I'd say they should be in separate modules because they are likely to be 
implemented on separate boxes on the SNMP client side.

Juergen Quittek wrote:

> Dear all,
> 
> In the MIDCOM working group we are developing a protocol for dynamically
> requesting pinholes in firewalls and bindings/sessions on NATs.
> 
> The working group decided to use SNMP as basic protocol and now we are
> defining a MIDCOM MIB module.  While doing this, we found that we are
> defining two separate groups of objects:  Objects implementing the MIDCOM
> protocol (for which we already have a protocol semantics document, see
> draft-ietf-midcom-semantics-06.txt) and objects serving management 
> purposes.
> Management purposes include for example configurations, such as
>  - the priority with which requested pinholes are configured in the 
> firewall,
>  - a table showing the mapping of MIDCOM pinholes to firewall resources
>    or of MIDCOM NAT sessions/bindings to NAT resources
>  - a protocol statistics table listing the set of active MIDCOM sessions,
>    protocol errors, etc.
> 
> For these two groups of objects there are also two separate groups of 
> users:
>  - middlebox controllers sending requests for dynamic pinholes and NAT
>    sessions/bindings
>  - network managers configuring the middlebox (firewall or NAT) and
>    monitoring its operation
> 
> The middlebox controllers only need access to the objects implementing
> the MIDCOM protocol.
> 
> The network managers would rather use the objects serving management 
> purposes
> although in some cases they might need to access the other group also.
> 
> Now, we have a draft defining these objects and the following question:
> 
> Does someone have an opinion about whether these two groups of objects
> should be contained in a single MIB module or in two separate ones?
> 
> Usually, this problem does not occur, because most control protocol,
> say GSMP are not defined on top of SNMP.  Therefore in GSMP there is
> a clear separation between the protocol and the MIB with objects serving
> network management purposes.  But in our case, SNMP is used for both
> purposes.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
>   Juergen