RE: Should a TC be allowed to remove the MAX-ACCESS restrictions of its base type?

["Presuhn, Randy" <Randy_Presuhn@bmc.com>]

Hi -

> From: C. M. Heard [mailto:heard@pobox.com]
> Sent: Monday, August 26, 2002 16:52
> To: mibs@ops.ietf.org
> Subject: Should a TC be allowed to remove the MAX-ACCESS 
> restrictions of its base type? 
...
> draft-ietf-rmonmib-hc-alarm-mib-01.txt now proposes to lift the first
> of these restrictions, i.e., that objects of the new type will inherit
> the MAX-ACCESS restrictions that are associated with the Counter64
> base type.  This seems to violate the rules of SMIv2.  Perhaps more
> important from a pragmatic standpoint, it is also possible that some
> implementations will always respond with an error if there is 
> a Counter64
> value in a varBind of a SetRequest-PDU, and could not implement a MIB
> module with objects defined this way.
...

I don't see anything in RFC 1905 or RFC 2741 to support such behaviour
by an implementation.  I do think, however, that MIB compilers that
follow the RFC 2578 rules will refuse to generate the necessary access
methods to support the request.  So, even though an SNMP master agent,
subagent, and run-time library might support such a request, the
question still remains of persuading one's tools to generate the
instrumentation to process the varbind.

 ------------------------------------------------------
 Randy Presuhn          BMC Software, Inc.  1-3141
 randy_presuhn@bmc.com  2141 North First Street
 Tel: +1 408 546-1006   San José, California 95131  USA
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 My opinions and BMC's are independent variables.
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