Subject: [Hubmib] POWER-ETHERNET-MIB query: Enabled but disabled?

From: Bill Fenner <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2007 17:24:48 -0400

I'm seeing a device where, on some ports, it reports
pethPsePortAdminEnable=true but pethPsePortDetectionStatus=disabled .
As far as I can tell, this combination of states isn't allowed by the
state diagram in figure 33-6 of 802.1af-2003 - it's only permitted to
be in the DISABLED state when mr_pse_enable is "disabled".  Assuming
that pethPsePortAdminEnable reflects the "disable/enable" states of
mr_pse_enable, this means that it's both disabled and not disabled.

Since this isn't the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, any wisdom
as to how a management station should interpret this combination of
values?  Should I just ignore the value of AdminEnable and pretend
that these ports were administratively disabled too?

Thanks,
  Bill

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From: "Romascanu, Dan (Dan)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2007 14:00:31 +0200

It looks to me that you are dealing with a faulty or non-standard
implementation of the state machine. I would suspect one of the two -
either there is an extra non-standard switch that activates the
detection mechanism on the port (maybe a left-over from a pre-standard
implementation) and which prevents the state machine to work although
pethPsePortAdminEnable=true or the implementation is buggy and while
searching it returns the initial pethPsePortDetectionStatus=disabled
value instead of the searching(2) value that should be returned for any
'state other than those listed above'.  

Dan

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bill Fenner [mailto:[email-masked]] 
> Sent: Monday, October 15, 2007 11:25 PM
> To: [email-masked]
> Subject: [Hubmib] POWER-ETHERNET-MIB query: Enabled but disabled?
> 
> 
> As far as I can tell, this combination of states isn't 
> allowed by the state diagram in figure 33-6 of 802.1af-2003 - 
> it's only permitted to be in the DISABLED state when 
> mr_pse_enable is "disabled".  Assuming that 
> pethPsePortAdminEnable reflects the "disable/enable" states 
> of mr_pse_enable, this means that it's both disabled and not disabled.
> 
> Since this isn't the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, any 
> wisdom as to how a management station should interpret this 
> combination of values?  Should I just ignore the value of 
> AdminEnable and pretend that these ports were 
> administratively disabled too?
> 
> Thanks,
>   Bill
> 
>