Subject: [MIB-DOCTORS] protocol number TC?

From: Benoit Claise <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 11:39:29 +0100

Dear MIB doctors,

Do you know if there is already a protocol number TC defined?
Note: browsed through RFC4181 and SNMPv2-TC, without success.

More generic question: how can we get a list of possible TC's? By 
searching in an NMS, loaded with all possible MIB modules?

Regards, Benoit.

---

From: "Bert Wijnen (IETF)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 11:55:08 +0100

Are you aware of
   http://trac.tools.ietf.org/area/ops/trac/wiki/mib-common-tcs
Bert

On 3/21/12 11:39 AM, Benoit Claise wrote:
> More generic question: how can we get a list of possible TC's? By searching in an NMS, loaded with all possible MIB modules?
>
> Regards, Benoit.
> _______________________________________________
> MIB-DOCTORS mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/mib-doctors
>

---

From: Benoit Claise <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 12:29:52 +0100

Hi Bert,

So I learned something today ;-)
I don't see what I need in 
http://trac.tools.ietf.org/area/ops/trac/wiki/mib-common-tcs. I even 
double checked RFC4001.
So I'll conclude protocol number TC is not present.

Thanks.

Regards, Benoit.

---

From: "Bert Wijnen \(IETF\)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 12:46:19 +0100

I am not claiming it does not exist,

but you are correct that we have not defined/listed it as
one of our common TCs. We may need/want to check that
every so often. I am not sure when we last did it (or even who
checked it at that time). I used to spend some time on it
as AD when I was AD. Dan did you check them once in
a while? Anyone else (Juergen?)?

Bert

---

From: Juergen Schoenwaelder <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 13:55:26 +0100

> Note: browsed through RFC4181 and SNMPv2-TC, without success.

If you mean a MIB version of 

http://www.iana.org/assignments/protocol-numbers/protocol-numbers.xml

then I think this does not exist. Note that such a TC would need to be
controlled by IANA.
 
> searching in an NMS, loaded with all possible MIB modules?

Sort of. I am trying to track all IETF/IANA MIB modules in the libsmi
source code repository and this is what I use to find things.

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder           Jacobs University Bremen gGmbH
Phone: +49 421 200 3587         Campus Ring 1, 28759 Bremen, Germany
Fax:   +49 421 200 3103         <http://www.jacobs-university.de/>

---

From: "Romascanu, Dan (Dan)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 14:10:22 +0100

We updated the page two or three times during my tenure, last time
around mid-2010. 

Maybe this is a good time for the MIB Doctors to discuss if anything
needs to be added to or taken off from the list of the most commonly
used TCs.

Regards,

Dan

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked] [mailto:mib-doctors-
> [email-masked]] On Behalf Of Bert Wijnen (IETF)
> Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2012 1:46 PM
> To: Benoit Claise
> Cc: MIB Doctors (E-mail)

---

From: David Harrington <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 11:45:47 -0400

Maybe it is time to have a registry created at
http://www.iana.org/assignments/smi-numbers for Tcs?
(I'm not sure smi-numbers is the right place, since Tcs don't have
numbers.)

-- 
David Harrington
[email-masked]
+1-603-828-1401

---

From: Andy Bierman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 08:59:26 -0700

> (I'm not sure smi-numbers is the right place, since Tcs don't have

Example:
http://www.netconfcentral.org/typedeflist

Too bad we can't just have tools to do this for us.

I plan to work on that -- I just have 27 other plans as well ;-)
We've been talking about running over Django on tools.ietf.org,
but the ncorg code is Turbogears right now.

Example:
http://www.netconfcentral.org/typedeflist

rsync --> rfcstrip -->  smidump -f yang --> yangdump -format=sqldb --> ncorg-db

WSGI --> Pylons --> Turbogears --> SqlAlchemy --> ncorg-db

Andy

---

From: Benoit Claise <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 17:32:57 +0100

Hi Dave,

Is there any light way to do this, or do we need a RFC with a specific 
IANA Considerations section?

Regards, Benoit.

---

From: David Harrington <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 13:11:40 -0400

I believe you will need an RFC with a specific IANA section.
You also need to discuss how this registry will be maintained, per RFC5226.
For example, What level of review is required for adding a new TC to the
registry?
You may want to require IESG Review, or just an expert's review.
Can enterprise MIBs define Tcs and have them added to the registry?
And so on.

I don't think the process would need to be heavy weight, if you design it
correctly.

-- 
David Harrington
[email-masked]
+1-603-828-1401

---

From: Juergen Schoenwaelder <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 19:19:00 +0100

> Can enterprise MIBs define Tcs and have them added to the registry?

Sounds like the pain is bigger than the benefit. It is fairly easy to
have smidump produce whatever is wanted and to simply built a tool
rather than a process. Note that there is no technical reason to
register TCs with IANA since we do not have ensure unique names or
such things. Hence, I assume a simple tool likely gets the job done
faster and more flexible.

/js

---

From: Benoit Claise <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 22:57:08 +0100

> faster and more flexible.
I concur.

Regards, Benoit.

---

From: "David Harrington" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 18:16:12 -0400

I would say the main reason would be to have one central plae to lookup TCs.
The registry would have the RFC# that defines the TC.

Unless the tool is available and maintained by the tools team, or is
available as a web service, not everybody is likely to have it available.

Juergen, Are you offering to provide a web service?
Would you consider putting this under tools team control and having it
hosted at ietf?

David Harrington
[email-masked]
+1-603-828-1401

-----Original Message-----
From: Benoit Claise [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2012 5:57 PM
To: David Harrington; MIB Doctors
Subject: Re: [MIB-DOCTORS] protocol number TC?

I concur.

Regards, Benoit.

---

From: Andy Bierman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 15:35:49 -0700

> Would you consider putting this under tools team control and having it

Has somebody volunteered to find and document all the standard TCs?
Has somebody else volunteered to review it to see if it's right?
Has somebody volunteered to update the registry every time a new TC is published?

This seems like a lot of work, but if you have the resources, and want
something administrative to do, a registry of TCs fits the bill.

Andy

---

From: "Romascanu, Dan (Dan)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2012 09:56:07 +0100

I think that this is more or less what we intended to do with the
creation of a Web page for TCs. A place where we would store the TCs,
configuration control by allowing access only to the ADs, maybe to the
MIB doctors, review by the MIB doctors, without the overhead of writing
an RFC and administrating by IANA. A lose an informal process supported
by the MIB doctors team. Is there any reason for this not to work? Or is
it not enough? 

Dan

> [email-masked]] On Behalf Of Andy Bierman
> Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2012 12:36 AM
> To: David Harrington
> Cc: 'MIB Doctors'

---

From: Juergen Schoenwaelder <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2012 10:24:04 +0100

> by the MIB doctors team. Is there any reason for this not to work? Or is

Perhaps "Generic and Common Textual Conventions" makes it unclear what
to add/remove. But anyway, here is the list of IETF and IANA TCs I
just extracted using something like

smidump -k -f identifiers ietf/* | awk '/type/{printf("%-30s %s\n",$2,$1)}'

just in case someone wants to check whether something should be added
to the web page. With a bit more effort, I can probably produce
something more useful.

That said, the web page tries to add value by listing "Generic and
Common Textual Conventions". At the same time, this makes the web page
useless for searching for TCs since it by definition is incomplete.

/js

PS: I note that even after years of discussions (that was still when
    Bert was AD), we still have no central place where one can pickup
    all extracted MIB modules. This would really be the first step for
    any automated solution but since this did not materialize for
    years, perhaps it is not important enough.

---

From: Juergen Schoenwaelder <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2012 10:43:03 +0100

>     years, perhaps it is not important enough.

Now with the attachements...

/js

---

From: "Romascanu, Dan (Dan)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2012 10:46:56 +0100

> From: Juergen Schoenwaelder [mailto:j.schoenwaelder@jacobs-
> university.de]
> Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2012 11:43 AM
> To: Romascanu, Dan (Dan); Andy Bierman; David Harrington; MIB Doctors
> > > creation of a Web page for TCs. A place where we would store the
> > > TCs, configuration control by allowing access only to the ADs,
> maybe
> > > to the MIB doctors, review by the MIB doctors, without the
overhead
> > > of writing an RFC and administrating by IANA. A lose an informal
> > > process supported by the MIB doctors team. Is there any reason for
> > > this not to work? Or is it not enough?
> >

Yes, we are talking about two different things: 

- a place to find all extracted MIB modules and all TCs 
- a place to find 'generic and common TCs'

Both have value IMO. 

Dan

---

From: Benoit Claise <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2012 11:05:48 +0100

Juergen,

Excellent.

Proposal to update http://www.ops.ietf.org/mib-common-tcs.html, to 
divide the pages into two parts:

1.  Generic and Common Textual Conventions (TCs)

2. List of all TCs in IETF MIB modules.
Produced from "smidump -k -f identifiers ietf/* | awk 
'/type/{printf("%-30s %s\n",$2,$1)}'
Last updated on March 22nd, by Juergen Schoenwaelder

DataCollectionSubtree                      ACCOUNTING-CONTROL-MIB
DataCollectionList                             ACCOUNTING-CONTROL-MIB
FileIndex                                             ACCOUNTING-CONTROL-MIB
AdslTransmissionModeType           ADSL-LINE-EXT-MIB
AdslLineCodingType                         ADSL-TC-MIB
...

Note1: hopefully the distinction between 1. and 2. makes sense?
I mean we have the full list in 2., but 1. mentions "Generic and Common 
Textual Conventions (TCs)"
So to come back to my initial question about a "protocol number TC", I 
now found
     Protocol                       INTEGRATED-SERVICES-MIB
Should I use it since it's in the full list in 2. but not in 1.?
Question:Do MIB doctors strongly suggest the TCs in section 1 while the 
ones in section 2 are nice to have?
In other words, do we only need the section 2.?

Note2: I believe the format is good enough for our purpose
     DataCollectionSubtree                      ACCOUNTING-CONTROL-MIB
We could always improve this with the TC definition, a link to the RFC, 
etc... but not sure the benefit is worth the time, as the TC name are 
most of the time self explanatory.

Regards, Benoit.

---

From: Juergen Schoenwaelder <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2012 12:10:21 +0100

On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 11:05:48AM +0100, Benoit Claise wrote:

> So to come back to my initial question about a "protocol number TC",
> I now found

Concerning the Protocol TC, that one seems to be doing what you want
(and it is surprising to find it in the INTEGRATED-SERVICES-MIB). Note
that using it creates a normative reference to (and hence dependency
on) the RFC defining the INTEGRATED-SERVICES-MIB.

> Question:Do MIB doctors strongly suggest the TCs in section 1 while
> the ones in section 2 are nice to have?

Hard to tell. There might be TCs in section 2 that should not be used,
e.g. definitions from the first attempt to support IPv6 where we moved
from separate IPv6 MIB modules to more integrated MIB modules. See for
example IPV6-TC defined in RFC 2465. While the RFC itself got
obsoleted by RFC 4293, the MIB modules defined in RFC 2465 did of
course not get updated and hence people can easily pick definitions
that are not really up to date. We are not really managing this part
of the life cycle well.

/js

---

From: Juergen Schoenwaelder <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2012 12:23:12 +0200

> '/type/{printf("%-30s %s\n",$2,$1)}'

During my train ride to Paris, I wrote a backend for smidump producing
a TC list in xml2rfc format that can be rendered as .txt or .html:

http://www.beadg.de/doctors/iana-tc-list.html
http://www.beadg.de/doctors/iana-tc-list.txt
http://www.beadg.de/doctors/ietf-tc-list.html
http://www.beadg.de/doctors/ietf-tc-list.txt

/js

---

From: Benoit Claise <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2012 12:53:37 +0200

Hi Juergen,

You made my day! Thanks.
I'l update the WIKI with these links.

Regards, Benoit.