Subject: Shared indices between Active and Clear alarm tables in ALARM-MIB

From: David Partain <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2002 14:12:22 +0100

Hi all,

Again, after several rounds of e-mail with Stefan, I have
another question.  Part of this is based on Stefan's gang trying
to build a manager application based on the current draft and
finding indexing to be odd.

There is a table with active alarms:

   alarmActiveEntry OBJECT-TYPE
      SYNTAX      AlarmActiveEntry
      MAX-ACCESS  not-accessible
      STATUS      current
      DESCRIPTION
          "Entries appear in this table when alarms are raised.  They
          are removed when the alarm is cleared."
      INDEX       { alarmListName, alarmActiveDateAndTime, alarmActiveIndex }
      ::= { alarmActiveTable 1 }

and there is a table with cleared alarms:

alarmClearEntry OBJECT-TYPE
         SYNTAX  AlarmClearEntry
         MAX-ACCESS  not-accessible
         STATUS  current
         DESCRIPTION
            "Information on a cleared alarm."
         INDEX   { alarmListName, alarmClearDateAndTime, alarmActiveIndex }

Note the shared index of alarmActiveIndex, which is a column
of alarmActiveTable.  When an alarm clears, it is removed from
the alarmActiveTable and an entry is created in alarmClearTable.

It seems _very_ odd that you can use alarmActiveIndex from a
row that in the alarmActiveTable that no longer exists.  A
manager cannot use this information to find out anything in the
alarmActiveTable, so why the shared index?  Shouldn't it just be
its own index (i.e., alarmClearIndex)?  There's nothing saying
that you cannot statute that its value must be the same as the
alarmActiveIndex corresponding to the cleared alarm.

If I'm just being stupid, I'm sure someone will point this
out :-)

Cheers,

dlp