Re: MIB lint web page available

[David Harrington <dbh@enterasys.com>]

Hi Bill,

Thank you for providing this valuable service.

One of the specific goals of the working group in producing SMIv2 was to
reduce the ambiguity of the SMI. The rule you cite is one change that
was made to reduce ambiguity. SMIv2 is a full standard, and it was made
a full standard because consensus of the SNMP community was that it
accurately reflected the best current practices of unambiguous
specification. 

I suggest that you would be doing a disservice to the community to imply
that using INTEGER instead of Integer32 is acceptable, and that RFC2578
got it wrong.

Dave Harrington
co-chair SNMPv3 WG

Bill Fenner wrote:
> 
> For some time now, I've been extracting everything that looks like a
> MIB fron RFC's and Internet-Drafts and they've been available at
> 
> http://www.aciri.org/fenner/mibs/
> 
> This is probably the first public announcement of something I've been
> doing for a month or two, which is running the "smilint" program
> (from libsmi) on each of these extracted MIBs.  The intent is that
> MIB authors can check their drafts for syntax simply by checking a web
> page, instead of by having to install some software.  (Yes, it's a small
> barrier, but it's obviously still a barrier, given the number of errors
> in published MIBs, so might as well lower it...)
> 
> http://www.aciri.org/fenner/mibs/htmllint/
> and
> http://www.aciri.org/fenner/mibs/htmllint/bydate.html
> 
> It seems that some aspects of RFC2578 are generally ignored (like
> the suggested 32-character limits on object names), and other aspects
> have evolved (like RFC 1442 and RFC 1902 suggest replacing INTEGER
> uses with Integer32, but RFC2578 says that they're indistinguishable,
> but the web page still warns that you should use Integer32 instead of
> INTEGER).  If there's consensus that parts of RFC2578 are not relevant,
> I can update the page to skip certain warnings.
> 
> Feedback is welcome.  Yes, a search-all-the-mibs feature is on the list =)
> 
>   Bill

-- 
---
David Harrington            Network Management Standards Architect
dbh@enterasys.com           Office of the CTO
+1 603 337 2614 - voice     Enterasys Networks
+1 603 332 1524 - fax       Rochester NH, USA