Re:int. cartography progress report

["Thomas Lenggenhager" <[e-mail]>]

I read the proposal with great interest, since in RIPE we tried to figure out
the necessary data for a link database as well. However we not yet came to a
nice proposal.

The list of the six tools clearly identifies the lack of powerful network
documentation tools today!

I don't know yet the detailed description of all these MIB variables (I have
to do some more reading there :-)). Three comments came to my mind when reading
the proposal:

	sysContact
this should be a pointer to a database with detailed information about
persons, including postal address, telephone and fax numbers. Better would
be to have a pointer to a list of persons responsible. This would be better
than having anonymous mail-addresses.

	sysLocation
It is very important to go to a more detailed level than only to longitude
and latitude, to be able to draw local maps as well! Coordinates in a local
coordinate system should be introduced to describe the situation locally to a
site.
E.g. all the maps in Switzerland use a special coordinate system, which
has its origin to the southwest outside the borders of the country. So all
coordinates can be measured in meters north and east of the origin, which would
give us the opportunity to define the position of a box very precisely without
using the more complicated degrees, minutes and seconds.

	ifEntry
Which way would you describe the following situation? A set of leased lines are
connected to an X.25 Switch, with IP on top of X.25.

Defining a human readable and easily processable file format on the basis of
all these MIB variables will require quite a lot of work to do.

Regards,
Thomas

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     Thomas Lenggenhager, SWITCH, ETH-Zentrum, CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland
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