Lloyd,
Novell is not implementing ANY of the optional groups. One of our
primary goals is to take a LARGE set of non-networked and legacy
printers that have no SNMP support and never will and be able to make
them visible to a management console. It will help for asset management,
graphical views of the network and its configuration, read only views of
some information about the devices, etc.
The whole idea of conditionally mandatory makes it significantly harder
for us to try and stay in compliance with this MIB, however this fact
aside, the idea of conditionally mandatory is the right thing for the
industry.
Having said that I still have this nagging thought in the back of my mind:
If we see success as starting simple and moving to more complexity
only with additional IMPLEMENTATION EXPERIENCE, then the notion of
making too many things conditionally mandatory without more experience
in the usefulness of the current mandatories is maybe requiring too much
of something we don't know that much about. Is HTML the most rich
markup language? No, there are many others out there that are "better",
but since it is so simple, it has caught on. Now, as we use it more and
more and more, we begin to clearly see the glaring holes and we begin
to fill them, but we are only filling what is essential, we are not starting
off with something so big and rich and "essential" that nobody uses it big
time. Do we really know yet how the MIB is going to be used and if the
information we are providing in the mandatories are really mandatory in
day to day practice?
That last part sounded more negative than I wanted it to, but it is a
nagging thought ....
Scott Isaacson
Novell, Inc.
Voice: (801) 861-7366
E-mail: scott_isaacson at novell.com