Subject: Re: [Hubmib] Power Ethernet MIB Last Call - Late Comments

From: "David Law" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2003 01:34:46 +0000

All,

As Dan mentions below I'm concerned that there may be some changes that are
about to occur in the IEEE P802.3af DTE Power via MDI Draft that may impact the
Power Ethernet MIB.

To update you all on the status of this work, the Sponsor ballot for IEEE
P802.3af DTE Power via MDI Draft D4.0 closed on the 1st January. The Sponsor
ballot is the second ballot of the IEEE P802.3 two stage balloting process. The
IEEE P802.3af Task Force met last week to perform comment resolution and while
good progress was made, the Task Force didn't complete this work by the end of
this meeting as originally expected. The Task Force is therefore meeting again
in a couple of weeks time to complete comment resolution. A new draft is then
expect to be submitted for Sponsor Ballot re-circulation in early February.

One area where there was a large number of comments was the PSE State Diagram,
for example to align it better to the behavior described in the related text and
to the register bits (Clause 22). Another area I have a concern with was that of
PD management. The register bits to support this have now been removed and there
is currently an accepted comment that would result in PD management object being
removed from the Management clause (Clause 30) altogether.

My concern is that these changes may therefore also impact the Power Ethernet
MIB in a couple of ways. Firstly, that the Power Ethernet MIB references states
in the PSE State Diagram that may be removed of whose behavior may be changed in
a way that will now longer provided the desired behavior in the Power Ethernet
MIB. Secondly, changes to the register bits in the Clause 22 registers may
result in implementations no longer providing the hardware support for the Power
Ethernet MIB, a undesirable situation in my opinion. Now while it may be
possible to list the individual updates required to the current Power Ethernet
MIB draft to align to the comments resolved so far, it is entirely possible that
additional changes could occur at the next comment resolution meeting.

Since I believe it is in the interest of the users of our respective documents
to assure that our two document align, and alignment between similar documents
in the past is something we have successfully achieved, it would be great if we
could assure that happens again in this case despite any change that may occur
to the IEEE P802.3af draft in the next couple of weeks.

Best regards,
  David Law

"Romascanu, Dan (Dan)" <[email-masked]>@ietf.org on 15/01/2003 19:22:38

Sent by:  [email-masked]

To:   <[email-masked]>
cc:
Subject:  [Hubmib] Power Ethernet MIB Last Call - Late Comments

The WG Last Call for the Power Ethernet MIB is ending today. In the last couple
of days I got calls for two contributors about late comments being prepared. One
of them is our colleague David Law from 3Com, who is the chief editor of the
IEEE management clauses, and will be making some comments related to later
changes in the IEEE 802.3af Draft. The other comments are coming from one of the
companies implementing the IEEE Draft. These comments might get to the list
later than the Last Call deadline, but I suggest that we admit and include them
as Last Call inputs.

Please let me know if there are any objections.

Thanks,

Dan

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From: "C. M. Heard" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2003 22:28:29 -0800 (PST)

On Thu, 16 Jan 2003, David Law wrote:
> As Dan mentions below I'm concerned that there may be some
> changes that are about to occur in the IEEE P802.3af DTE
> Power via MDI Draft that may impact the Power Ethernet MIB.
> [ .... ] these changes may [ ... ] impact the Power Ethernet
> MIB in a couple of ways.  Firstly, that the Power Ethernet
> MIB references states in the PSE State Diagram that may be
> removed of whose behavior may be changed in a way that will
> now longer provided the desired behavior in the Power Ethernet
> MIB.  Secondly, changes to the register bits in the Clause 22
> registers may result in implementations no longer providing the
> hardware support for the Power Ethernet MIB, a undesirable
> situation in my opinion.

That's putting it mildly.  It would be intolerable if the
Power Ethernet MIB were not aligned with the behaviour or
hardware resources of standards-conforming devices.

> Now while it may be possible to list the individual
> updates required to the current Power Ethernet MIB
> draft to align to the comments resolved so far, it is
> entirely possible that additional changes could occur
> at the next comment resolution meeting.
> 
> Since I believe it is in the interest of the users of our
> respective documents to assure that our two document align, and
> alignment between similar documents in the past is something we
> have successfully achieved, it would be great if we could assure
> that happens again in this case despite any change that may
> occur to the IEEE P802.3af draft in the next couple of weeks.

I agree.  I think that the WG should wait until the IEEE P802.3af
draft is considered to be stable, and then update the Power
Ethernet MIB to align with it before submitting the document to
the the IESG for consideration as a Proposed Standard.

That's not to say that all work on the Power Ethernet MIB should
necessarily stop.  There are a number of MIB doctor and "ID nit"
type things that need to be addressed, as I noted in previous
comments.  If the authors want to spin an updated draft to
address those issues, I'll be happy to give it another review,
and then to do it again when the final technical changes from
the stable IEEE draft are rolled in.  A certain amount of churn
is just part of the process.

Mike

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From: "C. M. Heard" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2003 22:28:29 -0800 (PST)

Mike