Subject: [Hubmib] preliminary working group meeting notes

From: Steve Moulton <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2001 14:10:42 -0500

Good Afternoon,

Here is the preliminary working group meeting minutes for 
the HUBMIB working group.

The slides are available in ftp.snmp.com/pub/hubmib/ietf50.  I will
submit the slides with the minutes, but saw no need broadcast the
slides to everyone on the list.

Please submit any changes or comments to [email-masked] by Wednesday,
April 4, 2001, so I can integrate changes and submit to the IETF 
secretariat by the deadline.

Best Regards,

Steve Moulton

---
Steve Moulton        SNMP Research, Inc            voice: +1 865 573 1434
Sr Software Engineer 3001 Kimberlin Heights Rd.    fax: +1 865 573 9197
[email-masked]     Knoxville, TN 37920-9716 USA  http://www.snmp.com

Minutes
HUBMIB (Ethernet Interfaces and Hub MIB) Working Group
Recorded by Steve Moulton
50th IETF
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Thursday, March 22, 2001, 3:30 PM

Welcome by Dan Romascanu.

Agenda Bashing.  No changes from published agenda.

Roughly 18 Present.

[
  This text will be edited out before submission to [email-masked].

  The slides are currently present in ftp.snmp.com://pub/hubmib/ietf50.

   ethernet_mib_wg.ppt - main working group meeting slides
   IETF50EtherMib.ppt
   IETF50MauMib.ppt
   IETF50WisMib.ppt

  The slides will be submitted with the working group notes, and therefore
  show up in the proceedings.

]

In general information available from the slides will not be reproduced
here.  The following list is an exception:

Agenda:

.  Introduction, agenda bashing
.  Status of the Working Group
.  Status of the 802.3 Working Group
.  10Gbs Ethernet Management 802.3 ae
.  Power Ethernet Management: 802.3 af 
.  RFC 2665 Editorial Issues
.  Discussions, working group actions, new charter (if relevant).

Administrivia:

.  Working Group Chair - [email-masked]
.  AD and Advisor - [email-masked]
.  New working group mailing list list - [email-masked]
.  To subscribe - send "subscribe <mail address>" to
   [email-masked].
.  Archive: 
   http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/working-groups/hubmib/current/maillist
.  IEEE 802.3 WG Web page:
   http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/3/index.html

Liaison with the IEEE 802.3 WG

   The liaison function was set up by Scott Bradner.  Dan Romascanu is
   the liaison person.  The intent of this was to make 802.3 private
   documents available for those who are actually writing the MIB 
   documents without having to attend IEEE meetings.

HUBMIB Documents Status.

   RFC2108 Hub MIB - leave alone?  
   RFC2668 MAU MIB - MAU MIB
   RFC2665 - ethernet-like Interfaces MIB
   RFC2666 - ChipSets for Ethernet-like interfaces MIB  Informational.
   
   All documents save RFC2666 are at proposed standard status.
   
   In the mind of the working group chair, RFC2668 and RFC2665 are
   living documents.  There is potential work in tracking changes in the 
   Ethernet world.
   
   Should implementation experience for RFC2108 be gathered to forward it to
   draft status?  While no consensus was established in the room, there
   was a frequently expressed opinion that since little new
   repeater implementation is taking place, there is little value in
   advancing this document.  The question is referred to the area
   director for his opinion.
   
   A discussion took place on the relevant merits of having this document
   status changed to informational or historic.  Since the MIB is in
   fairly widespread use, there was support for moving it to
   informational if IETF procedures would allow it.  Referred to the
   area director.
   
   The room consensus is that implementation reports for RFC2665 and RFC2668 
   should be gathered with the view of advancing these documents to 
   draft status.  An open question is whether these documents should be
   modified to support 10gb interfaces and therefore spun at proposed, or
   if they should be advanced to draft as is.
   
What is happening in the IEEE 802.3 Working Group Nowadays?

   There are three areas of activity:

   .  10 Gpbs ethernet - 802.3ae
   .  Power Ethernet - 802.3af
   .  Ethernet First Mile - EFM

   The number of participants in IEEE 802.3 in the past 10 months has
   doubled with increased change and interest in Ethernet.

   The IEEE 802.3ae Charter is to define 802.3 MAC parameters and minimal 
   augmentation of its operation physical layer characteristics, and 
   management parameters for Ethernet 10 Gb/s using full duplex operation.
   Note that this takes out repeaters from considerations, since they run
   at half duplex.
   
   In addition to the traditional LAN space, consider implications of data
   rates compatible with OC-192c and SDH VC-4-64c payload rate.
   This has implications at layer 5, and has implications wrt the SONET MIB
   working group.  We probably need to understand how we can work
   together and reuse the models that have been defined there.
   
   The IEEE 802.3af Charter is to define ways to provide power to
   ethernet devices via the network connection (see slides for details).
   Compatibility with existing equipment is an issue.
   
   Both working groups belong to the 802.3 committee.  Defining management
   from their point of view is providing a set of managed objects all 
   of which are hardware related, and providing a set of registers and 
   considering other hardware implications necessary to implement these objects.
   The 802.3 committee explicitly pushes the MIB work to the IETF.
   The statement was made that there are probably 10 or 20 people in the 
   IEEE that understand SNMP management.  They prefer to leave  the bulk of 
   the management work to the IETF.
   
   EFM (Ethernet First Mile) Proposed Charter.  This working group was
   changed from Ethernet Last Mile, due to "last mile == end" connotation.
   The intent is to expand ethernet applications to subscriber access
   networks, over copper (Ethernet over VDSL), fiber, and PON.
   
   This group applied for charter last week in the IEEE.  This work
   is not yet approved - we need to be aware of it, but not to approach
   the work yet.  On this round of work, we would like to be fully in sync 
   with IEEE, so that when the IEEE standard is being released, we can 
   produce the MIBs without a year gap.
    
Presentation: Ethernet MIB Updates for 10 Gb - John Flick. 

Please see the slide presentation for the bulk of the material 
(IETF50EtherMib.ppt).

   802.8ae adds three new objects associated with rate control.
   It is not clear that the Ethernet MIB needs to reflect these object,
   particularly since aStretchRatio is a read-write integer that
   can only have the value 104.
   
   Is the equipment going to be able to determine these things on their
   own, or it is going to be set at provisioning time?  
   We need to send a question back to them to clarify these objects.
   Everyone on the mailing list is welcome to comment.
   
   Updates to existing definitions - dot3StatsAlignmentErrors and 
   dot3StatsSymbolErorrs have editorial changes.
   
   Do we need 64-bit error counters?  Some objects can now roll over
   in less than one hour.   Of course, if these counters are rolling in 
   less than one hour, you probably have a problem anyway.
   
   Do we need to reopen the interface MIB?  Or do we define an extension for
   ifInErrors?
   
   ifTstTabletext and test OIDs have nothing to point to anymore
   The table died and its replacement table died.  Do we want to 
   define our own test methods?  I.e., do we want a way to do a
   loopback test on an interface via SNMP?  This is an open issue.
   
   We need to fix ifInErrors definition since it currently double counts 
   symbol errors since every symbol error causes a FCS error.
   We need to update ifMtu mapping to reflect implementations that support 
   > 1500.  802.3 does not support MTU > 1500, but many vendors do.
   
   There is a section in 2665 that says ethernet has no layers in ifStack
   table.  There is an editors note from six years back that that might
   now always be the case.  It is certainly not the case now.  So this 
   working needs to be fixed.  We need to explain how to use the stack
   interface.
   
   There was such a long lag between IEEE implementing 100mbit and this
   WG dealing with it that many vendors registered their own types. 
   The document should say: you might run into the old vendor specific
   ifType values, this is what you _should_ do when implementing an agent.
   
   The comment was made from the floor that in general we should tighten
   up this text with respect to MUST/SHOULD.
   
   Action Item:  Get procedure from IANA for fixing the ifTypes mess.
   The interface MIB does request that IANA deprecate these old ifType
   values. 

Presentation: MAU MIB Updates - John Flick.
Slides are in IETF50MauMib.ppt.

   There should be MUST text indicating the relationship between MAU MIB
   and Ethernet MIB and that the implementations must be kept consistent.
   The rest of the changes are covered in the slides.  Note that this new 
   technology does not use repeaters, so the underlying tables need not 
   be realized in this document.

Presentation: WAN Interface Sublayer Management - John Flick.
Slides are in IETF50WisMib.ppt. 

   The edge objects defined by SONET do not match up with the EtherNet
   MIB definitions.  The SONET MIB has 15 minute ethernet interval counters,
   rather than the traditional SNMP free running counters.  The story was
   told of the old telecom practice of taking pictures of counters on
   phone switches every fifteen minutes (literal snapshots), and how the 
   current practice echoes this historical practice.  
   The SONET MIB has a current table that has the current interval, and
   a 15 minute table.  You can derive the counters from the interval
   tables.  If we do this work, we should do it in cooperation with the 
   SONET guys.  The chairman of the SONET MIB working group has asked for
   this issue to be crossposted.  We have a volunteer to contribute an
   analysis.

The Power Ethernet MIB (draft-romascanu-hubmib-power-ethernet-mib-00.txt).

   This document is based on 802.3af.  See the main meeting slides
   (ethernet_mib_wg.ppt) for details.  We have several volunteers for 
   document co-editors.  It is nice that there is no legacy MIBs or other 
   curse-of-the-installed-base issues.

New Charter Proposal.

   Please see the slides for details.  The changes are primarily
   with respect to the new work already discussed.
   Note that repeaters are removed from the charter proposal.

   We expect no new implementations of the current MIB documents, so it
   is not clear whether or not these documents should move forward.
   The area director (Bert Wijnen) indicated that this is a good
   thing to consider, but that the pressure to do so is not high
   at the moment.

   There was a discussion of the informational versus historic
   status.  The reason that people are not implementing RFC2108
   is that that people aren't implementing hubs so much anymore, 
   in favor of switches.

   Bert will research going informational rather going historic.

   The chair's opinion is is that going to draft is not terribly 
   important, but vendors may think differently.   Please submit 
   implementation reports.

Goals and milestones.

   A final deadline of 2 Jan 2002 for the new documents proposed.

   Volunteers are John Flick, Dan Romascanu, and three others whose
   names I did not get.

The meeting ended before 5:30.

Respectfully Submitted,
Steve Moulton

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