Re: [MIB-DOCTORS] Doubt on naming convention

[Juergen Schoenwaelder <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Sep 05, 2018 at 04:59:58PM +0900, Glenn Mansfield Keeni wrote:
> Hi,
> Is there a rule or a convention for naming the MIB
> definitions in the DEFINITIONS clause below?
> 
>     XXXXXX-YYYYY-MIB DEFINITIONS ::= BEGIN
> 
> More specifically does it have to
> be all capitals?
> Is
>     Multicast-VPN-MIB DEFINITIONS ::= BEGIN
> OK ?
>

Technically, Multicast-VPN-MIB is a legal name. Practically speaking,
I count ~300 MIB modules in RFCs that have no lowercase characters in
their module name and ~15 MIB modules in RFCs that have a lowercase
character in their module name. And out of these, a common usage of
lowercase letters is to indicate a version number, e.g. NTPv4-MIB,
RIPv2-MIB, SNMPv2-CONF, SNMPv2-MIB, SNMPv2-SMI, SNMPv2-TC, SNMPv2-TM,
SNMPv2-USEC-MIB. And the remaining modules tend to be rather old
modules (or modules with a long history).

RFC 4181 (BCP 111) says in Appendix C:

   - The module name should be of the form XXX-MIB (or XXX-TC-MIB for a
     module with TCs only), where XXX is a unique prefix (usually all
     caps with hyphens for separators) that is not used by any existing
     module.

So the common convention is to all caps with hyphens for separators.

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder           Jacobs University Bremen gGmbH
Phone: [phone]         Campus Ring 1 | 28759 Bremen | Germany
Fax:   [phone]         <https://www.jacobs-university.de/>