RE: Methods in SMIng?

["Durham, David" <david.durham@intel.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David T. Perkins [mailto:dperkins@dsperkins.com]
> 
> Today, yes today, methods are being implemented in SNMP. However,
> you have to be a "MIB investigator" to discover them in SNMP MIBs.
> If you are "normal engineer", you probably will miss them unless
> the MIB module designer does a good job of pointing them out.
> There are MIB design patterns that can be easily followed to
> implement any method. Of course, as Juergen points out, it
> is sort of messy. You have constraints due to the SNMP protocol,
> such as a small max message size, limited flow control, and
> no builtin retries.
> 
> Unfortunately, I've seen poor MIB designs to implement methods.
> For example, they might only work if a manager has a long timeout,
> or if only one manager tries the method (that is, they don't
> cope with concurrent invocations).
> 
> So, I would rather see a high level specification of a method,
> and then "generate" object definitions in SMIv2 format than
> try to discover method definitions in SMIv2 format.
> 
[Dave] So, does this mean you believe that such a high level specification
of a method will have benefits, even for the current version of the SNMP
protocol? Ie. Benefits such as consistent MIB designs, standard mappings, or
reuse of code by management stations for handling the timeouts, retries,
etc. required for methods to be implemented using SNMP today?

Also, it would be helpful if someone took a stab at what a high level
specification of a SNMP-friendly method might look like... that is, one that
can be performed using the SNMP protocol as it currently exists.