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

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

Hi Jeff,

Comments inline.

On Apr 17, 2014, at 3:18 PM, Jeffrey Haas wrote:

> Sam,
> 
> On Thu, Apr 17, 2014 at 03:11:15PM -0700, Sam K. Aldrin wrote:
>> %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? 
> 
> As noted in earlier mailing list chatter, there is some support for write
> access in existing implementations.  Given the lack of significant detail
> when pressed for the name of such an implementation, I'm suspecting smaller
> vendor or internal implementation.  That's still sufficient to leave write
> available.
> 
> Given that one of the original contexts of asking if we could remove write
> was whether IETF was being asked to provide such a thing for MPLS-TP with
> related impact on your extension MIB and the answer was "no", that shouldn't
> be the main criteria.  
No. The context of my question is not related to MPLS-TP as such, but write-access support in general. 
I should have added 'clarification' in my earlier email.
> 
> My suspicion is that if we were to ship the base MIB with writeable objects,
> we may be forced to consider similar things for the extension MIB(s).
Both, bfd-mpls and mpls-TP MIB's are extensions to base MIBs, MPLS-TE and BFD-MIB respectively,  with write-access. Had to do write-access because of the reason you've mentioned above, which is base MIB. It would be painful to publish/support write-access MIB's when there is no clear interest. Hence my clarification question. 

-sam

> 
> -- Jeff