Re: DS MIB - please review this list...

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

>>>>> David Harrington writes:

David> I don't remember why NetworkAddress was deprecated in SMIv2. It
David> seems to me that if we want a tagged address, or a
David> discriminated union, that NetworkAddress did just that using
David> one extra byte in the Octet String, rather than as a separate
David> InetAddressType object. On the face of it, the NetworkAddress
David> approach seems simpler.

One can emulate the NetworkAddress even closer with TCs:

NetAddress ::= TEXTUAL-CONVENTION
    DISPLAY-HINT "1d/1x:"
    ...
    SYNTAX	OCTET STRING (SIZE (0..255))

The idea is that the first byte contains the descriminator while the
remaining bytes are the union. Note that such a set of TCs would give
you the address type for each address - even though the context may
already define the address type, similar to what is in the current
inet address MIB and which caused the whole discussion to start. ;-)

Note also that the instance identifier encoding is the same -
independent of whether you use an InetAddressType/InetAddress pair
such a NetAddress construction.

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder      Technical University Braunschweig
<schoenw@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de>  Dept. Operating Systems & Computer Networks
Phone: +49 531 391 3289    Bueltenweg 74/75, 38106 Braunschweig, Germany
Fax:   +49 531 391 5936    <URL:http://www.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de/~schoenw/>