Editor's note: These minutes have not been edited. The most active participants in the discussions (a few names were missed due to inattentiveness on the part of the note- taker) were: Uri Blumenthal, Jeff Case, Mike Daniele, Maria Greene, Bob Natale, Bill Norton, David Partain, Dave Perkins, Randy Presuhn, Juergen Schoenwaelder, Bob Stewart, Randy Turner, Glenn Waters, Bert Wijnen, and Steve Zilles. About 80 people were present at the meetings. Meeting notes were taken by Dale Francisco, wg editor. Meeting 1 (Tue, June 25, 09:00-11:30) ------------------------------------- WG chair Bob Natale opened the meeting with a brief summary of the meeting agenda, a charter review, and a summary of progress to date. He praised the work of Mike Daniele in coming up with an initial protocol draft, of David Keeney in creating and maintaining an agentx web page, and of Bert Wijnen and others who provided extensive review comments of the draft both on and off the list. The chair stated that the primary goals of this wg meeting were to do a detailed review and discussion of the agentx protocol draft, and to come up with a schedule and commitments on actions needed to meet the goals set forth in the charter. He then began a review and discussion of the agentx protocol draft. Two points concerning SNMP and the agentx framework were raised: o The draft should be consistent in using SNMPv2 as the SNMP base protocol. o Though for the purposes of the draft document, master agent and subagents are restricted to the agentx protocol (not SNMP) for all communication between them, this is not meant to constrain other interfaces that these processing entities might have. There was a long discussion on the issue of OID representation in agentx and support for non-ASCII character sets. Bert Wijnen described the translation burdens that the proposed ASCII representation of OIDs would impose on master and subagent entities in non-ASCII environments. Randy Presuhn pointed out that even in ASCII environments, ASCII representation of OIDs would be space inefficient, expensive to translate to and from BER, and would not collate correctly. A consensus was reached to use a binary encoding for OIDs (probably integer vector), and to remove any text in the draft that referred to character set selection. The second half of the meeting began with introductory remarks from Mike Daniele, author of the protocol draft, on what he considered some important topics for discussion: procedures for registration and dispatch; whether or not to include information about the originating management request's SNMP version in messages from the master agent to subagents; how to resolve ties among subagents in the case of exactly duplicate registrations; and whether it was worth having a subagent flag registrations of fully-qualified instances, in order to allow the master agent to optimize getnext processing. A discussion followed concerning subagent registration and the issues of priority, naming scope, and duplicate registration. Randy Presuhn argued that allowing a master agent to return a different (lower) priority than the one a subagent attempted to register at was sufficient to cover most cases of conflicting registration among subagents; Bert Wijnen and others felt that this was overloading priority, and that some of the bits in the flags field (h.flags) might be used to indicate, for instance, that a subagent wanted a non- overlapping registration of some MIB region (that is, a registration that would neither displace a subagent already registered for some or all of that region, nor be subject to being itself displaced subsequent to registration). On the question of whether or not to include information about the originating management request's SNMP version in messages from the master agent to subagents, almost everyone agreed that it was esthetically offensive to pass this information to the subagent; at the same time, some felt that the potential for burning CPU cycles with futile getnexts to a v2-syntax columnar object made it worth the wart. Further discussion on mailing list was thought necessary before this could be resolved. Meeting 2 (Wed, June 26, 13:00-15:00) ------------------------------------- The review of the protocol draft continued with consideration of section 6, "Protocol Definitions", beginning with the Register PDU. Many felt that exact duplicate or overlapping registrations should be disallowed, either by rejecting registration requests or by reassigning priorities so as to remove the duplication. Jeff Case felt that overlapping registrations at the same priority could be accommodated either by allowing the master agent to decide which subagents to call, or by calling all overlapping agents and choosing the "best" answer. Randy Presuhn suggested subagents might use in registration requests a flag bit that would indicate overlapping registration was acceptable, in order to catch common cases in which overlap was a mistake (e.g., someone left an old, buggy subagent running). He also felt that the logic needed in the master agent to handle overlapping registration at equivalent priority was probably little more than was already required to do getnext and getbulk processing. This was a large topic; further discussion was deferred to the mail list. A question was raised as to whether the reason code (u.reason) was needed in the Unregister PDU. Several people felt that a reason code might be useful in reducing finger-pointing in a multivendor subagent situation. It was decided to reserve judgement until implementation experience showed if the reason code was actually useful. It was agreed that there needed to be a more detailed specification of how a master agent implements an access control policy. It was pointed out that the draft lacks a section on Set processing. There was a brief discussion of the "alone" bit in h.flags; this would be used to tell a subagent during a Set operation that, because it was the only subagent affected, it didn't need to wait for "commit" and "end" PDUs. Most felt that this was an unnecessary optimization. The meeting ended with the agreement that many of the architectural questions that had been raised during the Montreal wg meetings would have to be resolved on the mailing list. Bob Natale appealed for help in filling in unfinished portions of the draft, and expressed the hope that with sufficient progress on the protocol specification, we might be able to do interoperability testing at the Atlanta Interop (September 16-20, 1996).