RE: registration OIDs: do the values matter?

[Andy Bierman <abierman@cisco.com>]

At 11:19 AM 2/23/2003 +0100, Wijnen, Bert (Bert) wrote:
>> >Indeed.  And I see a couple of assignments in that list that are
>> >wrong and need to be corrected.  Specifically,
>> >
>> >SSPM-MIB:     sspmMIB               M-I     { mib-2 777 }
>> >RAQMON-MIB:   raqmon                M-I     { mib-2 6889 }
>> >
>> >are listed in the corresponding I-Ds as
>> >
>> >SPM-MIB:      sspmMIB               M-I     { rmon 777 }
>> >RAQMON-MIB:   raqmon                M-I     { rmon 6889 }
>> 
>> these MIB modules are under development and will be fixed soon.
>> 
>They should NEVER have had these numbers in. Insetaad they shoul do:
>
>> >SPM-MIB:      sspmMIB M-I     { rmon xxx } -- to be assigned by Someone
>> >RAQMON-MIB:   raqmon  M-I     { rmon xxx } -- to be assigned by Someone

there's a practical problem with this approach -- this is illegal SMI.
MIB compilers don't like it. That's why we use bogus numbers instead.
I usually use 999999 to make it clear the number is bogus.  Other
MIB authors don't seem to do this.


>The plain assignment of arbitrary numbers is a BUG in the WG process.
>
>The "Someone" is the problem here. For WGs that do their own stuff,
>it is very unclear to me how we keep control and avoid possible
>bugs that turn out in conflicting (colliding) assignments.

The WG Chair uses the same process as IANA. They check a list of
assigned numbers and give out the next unused number.  Just because
the authors of the SSPM and RAQMON MIBs picked random numbers 
doesn't mean this process can't work.  I will make sure from now on
that RMON MIB authors use the correct number as soon as a draft
gets a draft-ietf-rmonmib file name.


>Bert 

Andy