Re: Comments from the meeting on Monday and the draft

[Michael MacFaden <mrm@riverstonenet.com>]

On Thu, Dec 13, 2001 at 01:39:16PM -0700, Philip J. Nesser II wrote:
>As much as I appreciate the elegant concepts in the whole OID model, I have to say that it is not likely to be apreciated as a solution to this problem.  One of the reasons that I heard from community pushing for this document is the failure of SNMP to solve these types of issues.  Subsuming an integral part of SNMP as a part of the solution space here is not likely to be popular.

How do you define the problem? 

I see one problem of how do you assign a semantic to
a number for all time and space such that one knows what 
a given number means when one sees it. 

If this is the problem then I'd say the OID/SMI solved it very well. 
Yes there are things that components of the Internet Management
Framework does not solve. Please define which ones you are talking about 
in this case. 

I really hate throwing the baby out with the bathwater....

Like any technology that solves a problem well, it is easy to forget 
what hard problems were actually solved. 

The SMI (structure of management information) can be considered 
as a stand alone component of the framework. 
OIDS can be used by themselves for just about anything 
with out needing SNMP protocol or an adapted subset of ASN.1 for encoding 
or even a MIB module to describe them. 

The book "Understanding SNMP MIBs" by David Perkins has a good treatment
of the subject. 
 
>As for a lifecycle I would suggest that either a group be spun off to spend time thinking about a structure and mandate a series of required codes.  It is also possible to make the number space large enough to be reasonable for the forseeable future.  (i.e. use 5, 6, 7, etc... digits) to allow millions of possible codes.  

That is necessary but not sufficient.

You have to allow for delegated assignments/private address
space to have this work. You will have an IANA maintained number set.

Then there are rules for how to be forward & backward compatible
and how to deprecate/obsolete codes and introduce new ones over time 
or even if one can reuse a code for a different but similar semantic. 

So I think if there needs to be any codes defined, one can look
no further than stdlib.h
  EXIT_SUCCESS 0
  EXIT_FAILURE 1

There are so many CLI programs in unix which don't even follow this
convention. So I'm pessimistic any such effort expended here will 
do much better unless it is scoped to some subset of mgmt functions
exposed through mgmt plane of IETF protocol.

>The goal is to allow people developing code to implement configuration management programatically.  
>Writing a parser to deal with 7 digit codes is not much harder than 4 digits.  

Agreed. The problem is there is no way for the program to know what to do with
the digits once it parsed it. For for specific codes and what to do, I'd continue look 
in the vendor manual before I look at any IETF document.

Mike