Re: RADEXT Issue 148 Item 6

[Claudio Lapidus <clapidus@gmail.com>]

Hello all,

In addition to this most interesting discussion between "design" and
"implementation" points of view, let me state a simple fact from the
"user" perspective:

>  Another disconnect, I think, is the differences between design and
> implementation.  The MIB's define counters, which is well and good,
> but implementations have to make *some* decision for topics on which
> the MIBs are silent.  Since we can't describe all possible scenarios
> in the MIB specification, some level of vagueness is built-in to it.

True. Every user of the same "standard" MIB objects as implemented by
different SNMP agents knows the hard way that it is necessary first to
test thoroughly what is exactly the way a particular piece of software
implements a certain object. Anything can happen, from very subtle
differences that go undetected for several months to flagrant
discrepancies and whole portions of the MIB unimplemented, and indeed
it happens all the time, from all vendors.

Fortunately, all these seldom results in "interoperability" problems,
at least in the classical sense of the word. The work of implementing
network management systems is overall one of integration, and while
two implementations may differ in a certain detail, they usually do it
in a consistent way, i.e. they always differ in the same manner, so it
is relatively easy to define correlation and aggregation rules at the
NMS level to iron out those differences.


>  These issues hold true not only for RADIUS, but for any MIB
> implementation which have relationships between multiple counters.

Ditto.


best regards
cl.

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