I checked our agreements that we reached yesterday on our telecon about
the prtChannelInformation object and have the following comments:
1. What are the conformance requirements for an agent populating the
prtChannelInformation object with a keyword that is defined for a channel
enum that the agent is implementing?
a. Are agents that implement one of our channel types required to populate
the prtChannelInformation object with each keyword that that enum
registration specifies?
b. Or is it optional for an agent to use whichever keywords that it wants?
c. Or should we make each keyword conditionally mandatory, in that an agent
shall include the keyword, if that implementation has the concept?
d. Or should the MIB spec require that each registration indicate which
keywords are mandatory, which are conditionally mandatory and which are
optional?
2. What if the agent doesn't know what the value for a mandatory keyword?
a. What if the keyword is, say, Port=, but the agent cannot discover or
the implementation does not have a way of telling the agent what the port
is?
b. Do we need a convention for an agent to indicate "unknown"?
c. Could an empty value mean unknown for all keywords?
d. Or can the spec just say that an agent that doesn't know what the value
is just omits the entire keyword and value from prtChannelInformation?
We need to add the answer to our spec for prtChannelInformation.
3. Some management tools dump an object of type DisplayString as binary, if
they find any control characers in the data. So such tools will not display
our prtChannelInformation object in a(n English-speaking) human readable form.
A suggestion that would solve this problem is to pick a printing character
as the keyword separator that is unlikely to be in a string value.
a. I suggest the ASCII VERTICAL BAR (|), instead of LINE FEED.
4. Is there some other adjective that we can use beside "human readable"
so that we don't offend non-English speaking people?
a. How about printable?
Thanks,
Tom