Re: changes of draft-ops-endpoint-mib-05.txt

[Juergen Schoenwaelder <schoenw@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de>]

>>>>> Bert Wijnen writes:

Bert> The MIB looks good to me.  I have two nits:

Bert> - At the top of page 13, you still use "dns(4)" two times.

Thanks, fixed in my XML sources now.

Bert> - in peerAddress DESCRIPTION clause you talk about use of DNS it
Bert> seems to me that the different times of when DNS lookup needs to
Bert> occur (based on if it came from an SNMP manager or if it came
Bert> from the managed entity itself), it seems to me that that is
Bert> confusing? But maybe it is just me.

Yes, it is confusing - partly because DNS names are confusing. ;-)

The meaning of a DNS name may change over time and the question
therefore is whether

(a) an agent stores internally a DNS name and does a DNS lookup
    whenever it needs to use the associated IP address, or

(b) an agent stores internally an IP address and it does a DNS lookup
    whenever it needs to report the DNS name.

And whether you use (a) or (b) may depend on where the DNS name or IP
address comes from. If it is administratively set, then I would expect
that the agent better keeps the DNS name (strategy (a) above). If the
value comes from the managed resource, I would expect that the agent
does (b).

The idea behind this example was to make this issue clear. But I
probably failed to find the right wordings. What about the following
version:

  If a row is created administratively by an SNMP operation and the
  address type value is dns(16), then the agent stores the DNS name
  internally. A DNS name lookup must be performed on the internally
  stored DNS name whenever it is being used to contact the peer.

  If a row is created by the managed entity itself and the address
  type value is dns(16), then the agent stores the IP address
  internally. A DNS reverse lookup must be performed on the internally
  stored IP address whenever the value is retrieved via SNMP."

Is it better or worse?

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder      Technical University Braunschweig
<schoenw@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de>  Dept. Operating Systems & Computer Networks
Phone: +49 531 391 3289    Bueltenweg 74/75, 38106 Braunschweig, Germany
Fax:   +49 531 391 5936    <URL:http://www.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de/~schoenw/>