Re: Help/guidance on L2TPv3 MIB draft

[Mark Ellison <ellison@ieee.org>]

Hi Andy,

Allowing for subagent to subagent queries would be predicated upon having
sufficient security in place.  Support for the SNMPv3 security has been proposed
as work items (see the "security credentials"  and "isAccessAllowed()" threads
on the agentx-email list).

Until there is an update to the AgentX protocol, this sort of orchestration must
occur "out of scope" or "out of band" to a standards compliant snmp agent.

I would suspect the subagent knowing about certain scalars would likely be part
of the same daemon or process as that responsible for spawning instance daemons,
so would probably already contain the instrumentation, or access to it the local
instrumentation's of the scalar without additional demands on the snmp agent.  I
think this true for both monolithic and run time extensible agents.

If the eos and sming working groups create changes to the operations and the
underlying PDU structure, then there is a definite need to make changes to
AgentX to support these new features  (One option would be to convert everything
per `on the wire' for compatibility with the current set of AgentX PDUs, but
this would be extremely inefficient).  So I think there'll be ample time to
discuss subagent to subagent requests as well.

In the meantime, pointing out issues to MIB designers is still a very good tool.

Regards,

Mark


Andy Bierman wrote:

> [deletions]
>
> Here is one more design approach:
>
> (4) Allow for sub-agent to sub-agent queries.  E.g., the sub-agent that
>     registers for ifNumber sends a request to every other sub-agent for
>     the number of rows in ifEntry owned by that sub-agent.
>
> Either this or (2) below are acceptable because they don't force
> MIB design changes.
>
> Andy
>

[deletions]