SNMP Interoperability Testing

[Steven Waldbusser <[e-mail]>]

SNMPv2 Interoperability Testing

CMU will be hosting an SNMPv2 Interoperability Test on 4/11 and 4/12
at CMU's campus in Pittsburgh, PA.

The sole purpose of this event is to develop interoperability of
SNMPv2 products.  This event will be open to organizations or
individuals who are developers and architects of SNMPv2-compliant
hardware and software.  Each organization may be represented by up to
two engineering personnel.  This event will not be a marketing or
press event and attendees will need to sign a non-disclusure
agreement.  The only information released will be the list of
participating vendors and a vendor-neutral description of common
problems that can be fed back to the standards process to increase the
quality of the specifications.

This event is being set up to encourage vendors to bring beta (even
alpha) implementations, as well as shipping products.  Mistakes can be
made and corrected without attracting media or competitive marketing
attention.  The timing is considered strategic with respect to
Interop, providing a spurt of development activity a few weeks before
Interop, while providing enough time to integrate changes into
demos.

We encourage vendors to make the most of this event by bringing a
development environment so that bugs may be fixed immediately.  We
expect that most vendors will take advantage of this (in previous
interoperability tests, vendors with development environments got much
more out of the event).  Much of the value of an event of this sort
will be the face-to-face interaction with other developers and
experts, and group discussions of lessons learned.

The testing will consist both mostly of coordinated cross-product
testing, but will also contain automated testing programs to test
certain features of SNMPv2.  One of the more interesting aspects of
this test is that much of it will be run on CMU's production network,
a network of 6000 Unix, Macintosh, and PC hosts serving 9,000 users.
This network uses TCP/IP, AppleTalk, Novell, and DecNet across roughly
150 networks (Ethernet, Token Ring, and LocalTalk).  This has proven
to be an interesting real-world environment in which to test product
robustness.  In addition, CMU will provide Internet access.

Local arrangements will be detailed in a few days.  It is strongly
suggested that attendees arrive Sunday night and leave late Tuesday
night (or Wednesday morning) so that we may have two full days of
undisturbed testing.  We can recieve your shipped equipment and hold
it for you before the event.  There will be a nominal fee charged to
each organization to recover the costs of staging the event.

Please answer the following questions for our planning purposes.
Please respond ASAP because space is limited.

1.  Company Name:
2.  Name of primary contact person:
3.  e-mail address:
4.  Phone #: 
5.  Fax #:
6.  Postal Address:
7.  Will you be attending? [yes|no|maybe]:
8.  Number of engineers attending:
9.  Please describe the equipment you will bring:
10. Special requirements:


Thanks,
Steve