RE: Notifications

["Sharon Chisholm" <schishol@nortelnetworks.com>]

Hi

Actually, technically you agreed with everything I said ;-) The bit you
didn't agree with is the bit I left unsaid namely that this could be
considered bad practice. I didn't say it since I know the argument to design
to smart managers. I don't care if it doesn't get labelled as bad practice,
so long as we don't consider it good.

Sharon

-----Original Message-----
From: Andy Bierman [mailto:abierman@cisco.com] 
Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2004 4:44 PM
To: Chisholm, Sharon [CAR:0S00:EXCH]
Cc: mreview@ops.ietf.org
Subject: RE: Notifications


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