Re: Gen-ART review of draft-ietf-bfd-mib-17

["Sam K. Aldrin" <[e-mail]>]

Hi Adrian,

One comment inline.

On Apr 17, 2014, at 2:55 PM, Adrian Farrel wrote:

> Hi David,
> 
> Thanks for the review.
> 
> To pick out one of your points:
> 
>> This MIB contains many writable objects, so the authors should
>> take note of the IESG statement on writable MIB modules:
>> 
>> 	http://www.ietf.org/iesg/statement/writable-mib-module.html
>> 
>> I did not see this mentioned in the shepherd writeup.  If the OPS Area
>> has not been consulted, I strongly suggest doing so during IETF Last
>> Call, e.g., starting with Benoit Claise (AD).
> 
> The OPS Directorate and the MIB Doctors will have been alerted to this document
> by the last call and we can expect their comments.
> 
> But this question was discussed between the AD and the authors, and the AD was
> unlikely to agree to sponsor the document if he felt it went against the IESG
> statement. Our discussion resulted in some reduction of writeable objects.
> 
> I think there are several points to consider:
> 1. This document had already been completed and publication requested (i.e.
> shepherd write-up written) at the time of the IESG statement. It would be
> unreasonable to make the statement retrospective.
> 2. There are already various implementations in equipment (not just management
> stations) of proprietary modules approximating to this document and these
> support write-access.

%sam - If this MIB allows write access, do you/WG anticipate, any extension to the MIB should also provide write-access as well? For example: http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-bfd-mpls-mib/ augments this base MIB to support MPLS. It adds more confusion than solving the issue as base MIB supports write-access, but augmented/ MIB extension doesn't. 

As the BFD MIB authors were not supportive of write-access objects in the MIBs, why to have them in the first place? 

cheers
-sam
> 3. This is a low-level component protocol of the sort that is used on dumber
> devices and that is an area where write-access is more common.
> 
> Cheers,
> Adrian
> 
>