Re: [RMONMIB] Overflow Counters (was comments on draft-ietf-rmonmib-dsmon-mib-02.txt)

[lester@netscout.com]

Hi,

On the surface it looks like a good idea to drop excess baggage by not
having the overflow counters, but this could cause a source of confusion
for the management stations.  In our applications we choose not to poll the
64-bit counters, but rely on the two 32-bit counters (base + overflow).
This way the application does not have to bother if the agent supports
SNMPv2C or not.
By dropping the 32-bit overflow counters, the management station will have
to determine if the agent supports 64-bit counters or not and then poll
only the OID's that the agent supports.  This can easily break the
application when it encounters one agent implementation with 64-bit
counters and one with  32-bit counters.

In all I would say that  the MIBs should countinue to support the 32-bit
overflow counter unless there is a huge advantage of not doing so.

Lester D'Souza
NetScout Systems, Inc.
lester@netscout.com





Andy Bierman <abierman@cisco.com>@ietf.org on 10/02/2000 11:07:00 AM

Sent by:  rmonmib-admin@ietf.org


To:   mibs@ops.ietf.org
cc:   rmonmib@ietf.org
Subject:  [RMONMIB] Overflow Counters (was comments on
      draft-ietf-rmonmib-dsmon-mib-02.txt)


[this was originally posted to the RMONMIB WG mailing list, but Bert asked
 me to move the thread to this list. Sorry for the X-post, but many RMON WG
 members are not on this list.]

Hi,

I would like to propose that it is time to stop duplicating Counter64
objects in MIBs with a "Counter32/Overflow32 pair". It is time to
require SNMPv2C support in applications to access 64-bit counters.

I would like to remove all of the "overflow counters" from the DSMON MIB,
(such as dsmonStatsInOvflPkts or dsmonStatsOutOvflOctets).  The 32-bit
versions should remain, because DSMON could obviously be implemented on
a device that doesn't need 64-bit counters.

For devices that implement the Counter64 version of a counter object, the
corresponding Counter32 version must also be present, and should equal the
lower 32 bits of the 64-bit version at all times.

Furthermore, it shall be the policy of the RMONMIB WG that no such
"overflow counters" will be published in any future work.

Any objections to changing the DSMON MIB and/or establishing this policy
for the WG?

Andy

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