Subject: Re: TimeStamp issues

From: Randy Presuhn <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 1999 09:59:16 -0800 (PST)

Hi -

> Date: Wed, 15 Dec 1999 18:17:36 +0530
> From: Nalinaksh Pai <[email-masked]>
> To: Dave Shield <[email-masked]>
> CC: [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: TimeStamp issues
> References: <[email-masked]>
> List-Id: IETF Agentx Working Group mailing list <[email-masked]>
...
> If the master agent goes down and comes up again, the value of the sysUpTime
> would be reset back in time. The subagent now would extract this sysUpTime
> from the agentx response PDU and reset its own sysUpTime reference base. But
> what about the MIB objects on the subagent who have stored values w.r.to the
> previous time scale of the sysUpTime before the master agent went down?
...

TimeStamps are misnamed.  They have lots of problems, discussed on this
list as far back as 1996, and in greater depth on the SNMPv3 list in
the thread entitled "Epochal discontinuity" starting in June of 1998.

This resulted in clarification of the TimeStamp definition in RFC 2579,
which requires the stale TimeStamps to be reset to zero in the
scenario you described.  

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 Randy Presuhn           [email-masked]       http://www.bmc.com/
 Voice: +1 408 546-1006  BMC Software, Inc.  1-3141  2141 N. First Street
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