Editor's Note: Minutes received 12/9/92

CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_

Reported by Marshall Rose/DBC

Minutes of the SNMP Version 2 Working Group (SNMPV2)

The Agenda was reviewed and approved.  In the discussion which follows,
the decisions reached by the Working Group are summarized.  In the
majority of cases, there was significant, protracted discussion.  In the
interests of brevity, that discussion is not reproduced here.

Outstanding Procedural Issues were Discussed


  o Deadline to Finish:  Although a meeting slot has been identified
    for December, the Chair wanted to try to conclude business this
    week as several slots were scheduled for the Working Group.  There
    was strong consensus that an additional meeting should be avoided
    if at all possible.

  o No New Proposals:  There was consensus that only ``bug fixes'' and
    ``show stoppers'' would be addressed after the conclusion of this
    meeting.  The one exception is the row-creation and associated
    proposals, see III.10 below.

  o Deadlock Shelf:  There was consensus that deadlock shelf would
    remain in place for proposals for which consensus could not be
    reached.  From time to time, these items will be taken off the
    shelf to see if there is a new consensus.

  o More Implementation Experience:  There was consensus that no
    additional implementation requirements would be placed on the
    documents prior to the Working Group completing its work.


Deadlock Shelf:

1.  Changing descriptors/enumerations w/o changing object's OID

There was consensus that this would not be allowed, because descriptors
could be IMPORTed to other modules.  As such, a change in either would
result in a change in OID.

2.  Adding enumerations w/o changing object's OID

An action was taken by the editor and Dave Perkins to make a proposal in
this area.  After discussion, the proposal was rejected and instead
there was consensus that adding enumerations w/o changing an object's
OID was permissible.

3.  LABEL clause

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There was consensus that this clause was to be dropped.  However, a new
effort outside of the SNMPv2 Working Group should be formed to
investigate related functionality outside of the OBJECT-TYPE macro.

4.  Accessibilities of auxiliary objects

There was considerable deadlock and intransigence on this issue.
Finally, it was observed that the two camps had polarized into agent
implementors (not-accessible) and management station implementors
(read-only), so the chair decided the issue in favor of the agent
implementors:  not-accessible was selected.

5.  readOnly error-status

Since some implementations return this value, the PROTO and COEX
documents were updated to reflect this and indicate the appropriate
actions to take.

6.  RowStatus:  a SHOULD or MUST

No consensus was reached as Marshall Rose argued the absent Karl's
Auerbach's position.  As such, the current text, ``should'' remains.

III. New proposals:

In order to facilitate the discussion, each presenter was required to
first demonstrate a problem, before presenting a solution.

1.  Tracy Cox of Bellcore demonstrated that delayed operations (e.g.,
due to slow proxy) was a problem.  Discussion of solutions was tabled
until after the SNMP Security WG meeting later that evening.  At that
meeting, two proposals were suggested.  As such, this issue has been
moved to the SNMP Security WG.

2.  Dave Arneson of Cabletron suggested that efficient retrieval of
tabular objects was a problem.  There was consensus that, in
bandwidth-limited environments, retrieval should be more efficient.
However, there was no consensus that this problem was specific to
tables.

3.  Anil Rijsinghani of DEC was absent, but a colleague demonstrated
that auto-discovery of SNMP agents was a problem.  There was consensus
that the proposal was on the right track, but that this work could
proceed independently from the SNMPv2 effort.

4.  Dave Perkins of SynOptics suggested that retrieval of
non-rectangular tables was a problem and there was sufficient interest
to look at the solution.  However, there was consensus that there wasn't
enough of a problem to warrant the solution.

5.  Dave Perkins of SynOptics presented his 41 SMI issues.  A few of
these were postponed to an off-line editing meeting (see Section IV
below).  Although all of the issues were discussed, in the interests of
brevity, only those issues which led to a change in the document are

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presented:

- Module labels, e.g., ``FOO'' in ``FOO DEFINITIONS ::= BEGIN'' must not
change across revisions of an information module.

- The module revision procedures didn't indicate how to revise
invocations of the OBJECT-GROUP macro.

- The introductory text for each document will be normalized.

- An action was taken by Jeff Case to provide an (approximately two
page) introduction to the components in the network management system
and their relationship.

- Parts of the SMI were re-ordered for ease of reading.

- The MODULE-COMPLIANCE and AGENT-CAPABILITIES macros were moved to a
new document, ``CONF''.

- An unsigned 32-bit integer-valued tagged type was defined.

- Full ASN.1 sub-typing, appropriate to the ASN.1 type being refined, is
allowed.  (This is a clarification.)

- The OID-VAL macro for registration assignments was created, but the
editor changed the name to OBJECT-IDENTITY.

- Text noting that the tagged types for IpAddress and NsapAddress were
historical was added.

- Clarifications of the AUGMENTS clause were made.

- Missing SMI-level coexistence issues were codified.

6.  Sam Roberts of Farallon presented his SMI issues.

- Various ASN.1 grammar typos in the macro were corrected.

- Clarifying text indicating that Counters can not, but that Gauges can
be sub-typed was added.

- Hyphens are not allowed in descriptor labels, enumerated labels, or
the names of textual conventions.  (This used to be a requirement ONLY
for ``standard'' MIBs, now all MIBs must obey this rule.)  The COEX
document indicates that these changes may be made without deprecating
objects.

- Problems with the IMPLIED clause were identified and a solution
provided.

7.  Anil Rijsinghani of DEC was absent, but a Jon Saperia discussed a
need for a unsigned 64-bit type.  However, the Group could not achieve
consensus on any adequate choke rule.  As such, following there was
consensus that despite some usefulness, that such a type would not be

                                  3





added.

8.  Marshall Rose of DBC described a problem in the definition of the
TEXTUAL-CONVENTION macro along with a solution.  Textual conventions are
now written as

<name> ::= TEXTUAL-CONVENTION <clauses ...> SYNTAX <syntax>

This is necessary due to macro definition restrictions in ASN.1

9.  Jeff Case of UTK suggested that the limitations on enumerated values
in INTEGERs was causing problems when translating MIBs written by other
groups.  There was consensus that the limitations should be removed with
a recommendation that newly defined objects follow the old rules.

10.  Bill Norton of Merit presented the row-creation portion of the
multi-part proposal by Guenther Schreiner, et.  al.  Discussion lasted
for over two hours.

Group consensus was that Create/Delete operators were not the solution
to row creation, but there is a problem with complexity and multiple
ways to use RowStatus.  Jeff Case took an action to reconsider this
problem.  The chair set a deadline of 12/4 for final resolution on this
issue and consideration of the other proposals that came with this one.

In comparing the row-creation proposal to the RowStatus mechanism, it
was agreed that the row-creation proposal did not solve the general
problem of row creation, as:  1.  Sometimes multiple PDU exchanges were
necessary in order to create a row, e.g., either because of a resource
negotiation process between the agent and manager, or because there
might be too much data to fit in a single creation request.  2.  The
response from the creation PDU added varbinds in order to indicate what
mandatory columns are missing.  However, this could make the request too
big to send back.  3.  The creation request is not idempotent due to
potential packet duplication and loss from the underlying transport
service (i.e., the request gets duplicated, the first succeeds, but the
response is lost, the second fails, and its response is returned.)

It was also observed that with the RowStatus mechanism, creation could
be done in a single exchange, if the DEFVAL clause was active and the
manager did a set to active.  However, it was agreed that this text
should be made more clear.  An action was taken by Steve Waldbusser.

After much discussion, there was consensus that the real problem was
that the community had three requirements:  1.  A single, consistent way
to do row-creation.  2.  Some row-creations take more than 1 exchange.
3.  Some agent writers wish to implement a simple table in such a way so
that row creation must be done in a single exchange.

An action was taken by Jeff Case on behalf of the four SMP authors to
see if some solution could be found which had these properties:  1.
Avoided the tooBig problem.  2.  Dealt with the discovery problem of
missing columns and defvals.  3.  Avoided stateful behavior.  Jeff Case
was careful to stress that this issue had been look at, in great detail

                                  4





by the SMP authors prior to the publication of the SMP specification,
and he was doubtful that a solution could be found.

IV. Off-line editing:

With the approval of the Working Group, Dave Perkins met with the editor
to deal with numerous minor issues:

- Because groups deal with both conformance and naming, the OBJECT-GROUP
macro was moved to the new CONF document to be used for conformance
purposes, and the SMI (and MIB and M2M) documents use the SNMPv1
mechanism for naming object groups.

- A usage example was clarified.

- The intention of textual conventions was clarified.

- It was redundantly noted that Counter objects do not have DEFVAL
clauses.

- An example of ``epoch'' was given for TimeTicks.

- The text concerning Opaque type was stream-lined.

- The use of the experimental branch was aligned with reality.

- When the STATUS clause of an object changes, its DESCRIPTION clause
should be updated accordingly.

V. Actions Outstanding:

- Jeff Case:  introductory text

- Steve Waldbusser:  look at clarifying RowStatus/DEFVAL active text.

- Four authors:  look at row-creation issues

- WG: discuss and resolve the Schreiner, et.  al.  proposals on
Set2Default, short termination of get-bulk, etc.

VI. Timetable:

There was strong consensus that the row-creation issue and other
associated, unresolved proposals.  would be given until Friday, December
4 to achieve resolution.

There was *complete* consensus that the final deadline for comments on
the 9 SNMPv2 documents would be

Friday, December 11

Unless the SNMP Security effort raised new issues, then the documents
would be sent forward to the IESG with a recommendation for advancement
to the standards-track from the Working Group.

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Finally, it was observed that the SNMPv2 documents could not go forward
without the revisions the 3 SNMP Security documents.  As such, it was
suggested that the membership of the SNMPv2 Working Group now focus its
energies on the issues before the SNMP Security Working Group.

VII. Documents:

Revised versions of the SNMPv2 documents were submitted to the
Internet-Drafts area.  In addition, ``unofficial'' copies are available
via anonymous ftp:

host ftp.ics.uci.edu area mrose/snmpv2/ files *.txt

The documents can also be retrieved via e-mail:

mailbox [email protected] body MIMESEND
mrose/mh-mime/snmpv2

These documents will be removed once the actual Internet-Drafts are announced.

Attendees

Elizabeth Adams          [email protected]
Steve Alexander          [email protected]
David Arneson            [email protected]
Toshiya Asaba            [email protected]
Fred Baker               [email protected]
Jim Barnes               [email protected]
Brian Bataille           [email protected]
Andy Bierman             [email protected]
Fred Bohle               [email protected]
Jack Brown               [email protected]
Theodore Brunner         [email protected]
Stephen Bush             [email protected]
Jeff Case                [email protected]
John Chang               [email protected]
Szusin Chen              [email protected]
Robert Ching             [email protected]
Chris Chiotasso          [email protected]
Bobby Clay               [email protected]
John Cook                [email protected]
Tracy Cox                [email protected]
Juan Cruz                [email protected]
Dave Cullerot            [email protected]
Cathy Cunningham         [email protected]
James Davin              [email protected]
Michael Davis            [email protected]
Michael Davison          [email protected]
Cynthia Della Torre      [email protected]
Manuel Diaz              [email protected]
Jon Dreyer               [email protected]
Jacques Dugast           [email protected]
Donald Eastlake          [email protected]

                                  6





David Engel              [email protected]
Michael Erlinger         [email protected]
Roger Fajman             [email protected]
Daniel Fauvarque         [email protected]
Karen Frisa              [email protected]
Shari Galitzer           [email protected]
Shawn Gallagher          [email protected]
Richard Graveman         [email protected]
Maria Greene             [email protected]
Michel Guittet           [email protected]
Robert Gutierrez         [email protected]
William Haggerty         [email protected]
Patrick Hanel            [email protected]
Ed Heiner                [email protected]
Gerd Holzhauer           [email protected]
John Hopprich            [email protected]
Jeff Hughes              [email protected]
David Husak              [email protected]
Robin Iddon              [email protected]
Kevin Jackson            [email protected]
Ole Jacobsen             [email protected]
Ronald Jacoby            [email protected]
Frank Kastenholz         [email protected]
Mark Kepke               [email protected]
Zbigniew Kielczewski     [email protected]
Jong Yeol Kim            [email protected]
Andrew Knutsen           [email protected]
Michael Kornegay         [email protected]
Deirdre Kostick          [email protected]
Michael Laufer           [email protected]
Mark Lewis               [email protected]
David Lin                [email protected]
David Lindemulder        [email protected]
Benjamin Lisowski        [email protected]
David Liu                [email protected]
John Lunny               [email protected]
Carl Madison             [email protected]
Keith McCloghrie         [email protected]
Evan McGinnis            [email protected]
William McKenzie         [email protected]
Donna McMaster           [email protected]
John Medicke             [email protected]
Douglas Miller           [email protected]
David Minnich            [email protected]
Mohammad Mirhakkak       [email protected]
Rohit Mital              [email protected]
George Mouradian         [email protected]
Patrick Mullaney         [email protected]
Daniel Myers             [email protected]
Rina Nathaniel           [email protected]
Hien Nguyen              h.nguyen@[email protected]
Mo Nikain                [email protected]
Tom Nisbet               [email protected]
Bill Norton              [email protected]

                                  7





Steven Onishi            [email protected]
David Perkins            [email protected]
Carl Powell              [email protected]
Ilan Raab                [email protected]
Richard Ramos            [email protected]
Venkat Rangan            [email protected]
Louise Reingold          [email protected]
Sam Roberts              [email protected]
Kary Robertson           [email protected]
Dan Romascanu            [email protected]
Marshall Rose            [email protected]
Shawn Routhier           [email protected]
Chris Rozman             [email protected]
Assaf Rubissa            [email protected]
Jon Saperia              [email protected]
Michael Sapich           [email protected]
Michael Scanlon          [email protected]
Sam Schaen               [email protected]
John Seligson            [email protected]
Paul Serice              [email protected]
Chris Shaw               [email protected]
Timon Sloane             [email protected]
Robert Snyder            [email protected]
Joo Young Song           [email protected]
Roy Spitzer              [email protected]
Einar Stefferud          [email protected]
John Stephens            [email protected]
Bob Stewart              [email protected]
Kaj Tesink               [email protected]
Dean Throop              [email protected]
Ahmet Tuncay             [email protected]
Warren Vik               [email protected]
Ioannis Viniotis         [email protected]
Steven Waldbusser        [email protected]
Alice Wang               [email protected]
James Watt               [email protected]
Luanne Waul              [email protected]
Gerry White              [email protected]
Peter Wilson             [email protected]
Steven Wong              [email protected]
Randall Worzella         [email protected]
Daniel Woycke            [email protected]
Honda Wu                 [email protected]
Jeff Yarnell             [email protected]
Kiho Yum                 [email protected]



                                  8

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