Subject: [edu-team] Idea for San Jose: "How to read a MIB"?

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 Apr 2004 15:43:18 -0700

This came up in the GEN-ART team yesterday, and I thought I should share it 
here (and with Bert).....

many people, including long time IETF technologists, find MIBs to be 
utterly impenetrable; when I give them a MIB to review, their eyes glaze 
over, and they say "I guess the MIB doctors will get this right".

But - we know from experience that occasionally we will have a perfectly 
syntactically correct and clean MIB that does absolutely nothing useful, 
because it does not match the needs of the underlying technologies. That's 
bad.

Personally, I find MIBs relatively simple to read - basically, I look at 
the table definitions and the indexing, and ask "do these map to things I 
understand that are in an implementation", and then I look at the entry 
definitions for the details of how things are represented. But I may be 
biased by history....

So I was wondering - would it be interesting to have a session for the 
"general public" at an IETF on the subject of "how to read a MIB" - not to 
write it, not to implement the server, but to look at the MIB definition 
and find out which parts of the information you're interested in you can 
actually extract using the MIB?

Offered to the team for their deliberations.... I thought it was worth 
mentioning....

What do you think?

                         Harald

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From: "James Seng" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Apr 2004 23:14:19 +0800

i falls into the group that say 'I dont know how to read MIB', much less write
one. if you give me one to read, i will just fall over and die.

james

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 16 Apr 2004 14:27:19 -0400

On 15 apr 2004, at 18.43, Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:

> "general public" at an IETF on the subject of "how to read a MIB" - 
> not to write it, not to implement the server, but to look at the MIB 
> definition and find out which parts of the information you're 
> interested in you can actually extract using the MIB?

I think it could be useful.  Finding a teacher might be a challenge.  
Has to be someone with the knowledge of a MIB doctor,  with the 
humility to understand how difficult it can be for others to 
understand, and with the  ability to teach.

Are there such candidates?

a.