Re: Multicast in draft version 5 comments

[James Watt <[e-mail]>]

Keith McCloghrie writes:
+---------
|> At 6:05 PM 1/2/96, James Watt wrote:
|> >|Those more MIB-literate than I am will have to help me decide whether it is
|> >|legal or not to change a read-only to a read-write.
|> 
|> This is one of those things that gets lost in lore. As the SNMP MIB was
|> originally developed, almost everything was read-only, under the assumption
|> the MIB specified the minimum, and that a system that wanted to write stuff
|> would do more than the minimum. Obvious examples are in the ipRouteTable,
|> which is entirely read-only, but folks routinely install (write - or even
|> worse, create) static routes.
|> 
|> That was by no means a universal position, though, and the other extreme
|> was that the MIB specified the maximum set of things someone could do; a
|> read-write variable might be implemented read-only. The statement was that
|> the MIB should specify what makes "protocol sense" and a subsetting
|> implementation might use a lower access class. This became the consensus
|> over time, and is canonized in SNMP V2's MIN-ACCESS and MAX-ACCESS clauses.
+---------
Hmmm... Perhaps this should get pointed out in the SMI or co-existence
document, i.e. when converting a MIB from V1->V2 SMI you are allowed
certain latitude in mapping from the ACCESS to the MAX-ACCESS clause...

Or perhaps a one page informational from the NM Directorate ?

Regards,
-james
____________________________________________________________________________
James W. Watt,     [e-mail]                   Ph: [phone]
Newbridge Networks 600 March Rd Kanata ON Canada K2K 2E6 FAX:[phone]