WIMS> CIM - Abandon AssociatedPrintChannelEndpoint class

WIMS> CIM - Abandon AssociatedPrintChannelEndpoint class

McDonald, Ira imcdonald at sharplabs.com
Wed Aug 15 16:01:56 EDT 2007


Hi,

[I've already discussed this rationale with Rick]

Our most recent CIM printing class is the Association
CIM_AssociatedPrintChannelEndpoint, which is a rather
heavyweight mapping of the 'prtChannelIfIndex' pointer 
to the 'ifTable' in MIB-II.

Why abandon this class?

(1) It overlaps with the pre-existing CIM_PrintSAP class!

(2) For modern multi-home network printers (with Ethernet,
    and various wireless interfaces), 'ifIndex' is ambiguous
    and in fact unknown to the application print protocols
    (there is no way to probe below the IP layer-3 socket
    to determine which datalink layer-2 interface is used).

(3) For older network printers, the mapping is trivial
    (serial, parallel, or network) and uninteresting.

(4) While the CIM class CIM_ProtocolEndpoint does contain
    MappingStrings for five 'ifTable' properties, it isn't
    reasonable to burden a CIM/SNMP Proxy with this support
    (and in case (2) above, is ambiguous anyway).

Therefore, I propose that we abandon 'prtChannelIfIndex'
object mapping for our CIM Print Device modelling.

Cheers,
- Ira

Ira McDonald (Musician / Software Architect)
Chair - Linux Foundation Open Printing WG
Blue Roof Music / High North Inc
PO Box 221  Grand Marais, MI  49839
phone: +1-906-494-2434
email: imcdonald at sharplabs.com

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