Re: Can we make table indices accessible again?

[Juergen Schoenwaelder <schoenw@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de>]

>>>>> David T Perkins writes:

David> I forgot to mention a trick from Evan, which is, for the API to
David> allow index objects to be requested, but you just don't include
David> them in the SNMP requests. So, if the API user asked for
David> columnar objects (ifIndex, ifInOctets, ifOutOctets), the SNMP
David> request would not contain a varBind for ifIndex, and the code
David> that implemented the API would generate the value.

I agree with you that good SNMP APIs will never retrieve INDEX objects
(except in a very few corner cases) since this is a cheap, easy and
sometimes very effective optimization. And good SNMP APIs will do that
optimization regardless whether the INDEX elements are defined to be
not-accessible or read-only. I have written the necessary code myself
so I know that it is doable and not too hard.

On the other hand, the fact that the SMIv2 kind of requires that all
people on the world use good SNMP APIs or work around with special
code is something which I think is perhaps not such a good idea.

/js