Re: [Agentx] Empty context in rfc2742

[Mark Ellison <[e-mail]>]

Hi Magnus

On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 4:32 PM, Magnus Fromreide<[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> As I understand 2742 agentxRegistrationTable is a view into the set of
> registrations that the sessions have done with the master agent and thus
> the values of that table should match the values in the actual
> registrations as far as possible.

Agreed.

> While this is true it is also true that the agent is free to map the
> AgentX-contexts to SNMP-contexts however it wish so I think this impose
> no limits on the values of AgentX-contexts.

Disagreed.

> This question is only regarding the _values_ of the agentxRegContext
> column.
>
> As I said above it believe that agentxRegContext should represent the
> values of the AgentX-context for all AgentX-registrations that is made
> on the AgentX-side of the master agent.

Agreed.

> The problem is that the value set for AgentX-context contains one
> element more than the value set for OCTET STRING.
>
> I am asking how the AgentX-context value that don't fit into the mapping
> from AgentX-context to agentxRegContext should be handled.
>
> EXAMPLE:
>
> Assume that two AgentX registrations are made to a master agent that
> implements rfc 2741 and rfc 2742.
>
> 1: { r.flags = 0, <no r.context>, ... }
> 2: { r.flags = NON_DEFAULT_CONTEXT, r.context = "", ... }
>
> Now as I read 2742 the value of the agentxRegContext column for
> registration #1 is ""

Agreed.

> The question is what the value of the agentxRegContext column for
> registration #2 should be?

I think the agent should reject this registration and suggest that the
agent should accept registrations in the non default context only when
the r.context length > 0.

The zero-length context name is reserved for the default context.
This is because the AgentX context names are mapped from SNMP context
names - RFC 3411, section 3.3 shows the default context as being the
zero-length string.  Non-default context names have a string length
greater than zero.

As such, it stands to reason that an AgentX registration per #2 above
will not be visible to an SNMP client/manager/command-generator
application and serves no useful purpose.

-- Mark