RE: Notifications

[Andy Bierman <abierman@cisco.com>]

At 01:04 PM 1/29/2004, Sharon Chisholm wrote:
>Hi
>
>I've never viewed it as good practice. The problem is when that the SMI cab
>be updated to add extra varbinds as happens with linkUp and linkDown. So for
>the same varbind in some implementations you see what is in the SMI and in
>others you see random junk. Yeah, sure you get the OID of the variable but
>if you are just looking at stuff in a dumb Notification viewer or someone
>does not write their code terribly well, this can cause confusion.

I strongly disagree.  We should not design for the dumbest
tools or clumsiest misuse.  

I wouldn't call this a good practice, but it is very useful
for applications.  The important thing is that all applications
must be prepared to encounter additional varbinds and disregard 
varbinds it doesn't recognize.  I know the SNMP documents say this
somewhere...


>Sharon

Andy



>-----Original Message-----
>From: Harrington, David [mailto:dbh@enterasys.com] 
>Sent: Tuesday, January 27, 2004 7:13 PM
>To: mreview@ops.ietf.org
>Subject: Notifications
>
>
>Hi,
>
>RFC2578, section 8.1 allows agents to append extra varbinds to
>notifications. Is this considered a bad practice?
>
>dbh