Re: Entities and multiple bridge instances

"David L. Arneson (arneson@ctron.com)" <arneson@yeti.ctron.com> Thu, 20 August 1992 15:49 UTC

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To: Hal Rosenstock <hal@synnet.com>
Cc: chassismib@cs.utk.edu
Subject: Re: Entities and multiple bridge instances
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 20 Aug 92 09:42:42 EDT." <9208201342.AA04626@synnet.com>
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1992 11:48:09 -0400
From: "David L. Arneson (arneson@ctron.com)" <arneson@yeti.ctron.com>


>There appears to be an entity table, which information about the logical
>networking devices in the chassis. Inside the entity table, there is the
>entity function (like bridge, router, etc.) and an entity IP address for
>managability. 
>
>Is it legitimate for multiple instances to utilize the same IP address 
>for management ? If one were to support multiple independent bridges in a
>chassis, this would certainly be the case. The only problem would then
>be that the bridge MIB doesn't currently support multiple bridge instances.
>If the bridge MIB supported this, then the entity table might need instance
>of the bridge number, or a chasEntityFunctionIndex.
>
>Is it then a requirement for each bridge to have an independent agent ?
>
>This also might be a problem for multiple independent routers in the box
>and MIB-II. Is each router required to keep its own MIB-II or should MIB-II
>be able to handle multiple instances ala RFC 1285, the FDDI MIB, in regards
>to multiple instances of an FDDI station in a box supported by the MIB
>(and hence multiple instances of SMT).
>
>
I guess from a chassis MIB point of view I'm not sure we need care.  If
you run multiple instances of the bridge MIB, MIB II etc.  The simple
answer to all these multiple instances is to use either chasEntityCommunity, or
chasEntityParty to demultiplex the instances.  This implies that have different
parties or community strings for each of the instances however you may want
that for security reasons.  This way you just need to keep track of the
the information internally.  It is trasnparent to everybody looking at the
box.  The address the bridge entity thru IP address and community string.

>