Re: trap design - theory vs practice

["Randy Presuhn" <randy_presuhn@mindspring.com>]

Hi -

> From: "David T. Perkins" <dperkins@dsperkins.com>
> To: <mreview@ops.ietf.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, April 07, 2004 11:09 PM
> Subject: Fwd: trap design - theory vs practice
...
> Below is a message that describes the current state of the art.
> It's sad.

Indeed.

> >Date: Thu, 08 Apr 2004 01:37:18 +0100
> >From: aparimana <aparimana@camart.co.uk>
...
> >MANAGERS - i can find *no* managers which decode the index fields of
> >the OID when displaying the trap - they *all* display the column name
> >followed by raw dot-notation for the index information (**apart from
> >mibExplorer**, which changed overnight as a result of my asking
> >exactly this question - thanks frank!)

I know my former employer's bilingual CMIP/SNMP management
system could pull them apart, (though it's been in mothballs for over
a decade) and I know my most recent employer had the software to
do it, though I don't know what they did with that code.  The "gotcha"
of course is that the management system needs access to
the relevant parts of the MIB module in some form in order to
parse the OID.  It's hardly rocket science, which makes it even more
sad that any software would be out there that wouldn't handle it.

(It would have been better if the rules for constructing
object instance identifiers resulted in self-describing values,
but hey, that would have been CMIP.  :-)

> >AGENTS - the only agents i have found which send a table cell in a
> >trap ALSO send the index fields as SEPARATE oid/value pairs in the
> >same trap.  Index columns, of course, are normally 'not-accessible'.
> >it would be illegal to send an oid in a trap from a column marked as
> >'not-accessible', while marking them as 'read-only' would mess up
> >table retrieval by get-next... so the index columns have been declared
> >'accessibe-for-notify'!

At least one commercial SNMP toolkit did not have this problem.
Words like "brain-damaged" come to mind regarding the situation
the writer describes.

> >surely designing an agent's mib this way is madness:
...

Agreed.

Randy