CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_

Reported by Nevil Brownlee/University of Auckland

Minutes of the Operational Statistics Working Group (OPSTAT)



Agenda

   o RFC 1404 (rewrite of RFC and BNF)
   o Client-server Draft
   o SNMP Users Guide
   o Charter Cleanup


An introduction and overview of previous OPSTAT activities and the
current drafts was done by N. Brownlee.



RFC 1404 Update

There are currently four known RFC 1404 implementations (Brownlee,
Clark, PSC and Sprint).  Michael Lambert at PSC has revised RFC 1404 by
integrating the revised BNF and making other grammatical cleanups.  The
BNF itself has had no substantive changes since the last IETF (really,
only cleanup of the BNF text was done).  As a result of some discussions
on the mailing list, text will be added to specifically prohibit any
ASCII control characters (i.e.  ASCII 0x00 - 0x1f) within an
ASCII-STRING. Finally, text will be added to eliminate any ambiguity
associated with attempting to specify variables within a tag not
specifically associated with an interface (the SNMP IP and TCP groups
are examples).



Client-Server Draft

Three outstanding issues were discussed about the Client-Server draft.
First, text will be included to ensure that ASCII control characters
cannot be part of an ASCII-STRING definition.  Second, all commands
which refer to a tag will be changed to only refer to specific variables
(e.g., SELECT). This change clarifies exactly what data you are
retrieving from the server (with a TAG, you might have unintentionally
retrieved much more data than you intended).  Finally, an aggregation
field will be added to the SELECT command so that a user could request
the server to aggregate data (say, from 1 minute data to 15 minute
data).  The aggregator verbs in RFC 1404 (TOTAL and PEAK) will be
supported.



SNMP User's Guide

A new document will be created to address concerns about what SNMP (and
other) variables should be queried on a device, what resultant values
are meaningful, and other useful advice about management data.  The
types of things to be included will be:


   o Minimum/typical/maximum set of variables that should be queried
     (along with hints about polling frequency)

   o Typical and error values for the variable

   o Common failure modes and ways of determining said failure from the
     variables


This data will be collected for common media types (serial lines,
ethernet, etc.)  as well as common vendor equipment (e.g., routers).
The format of each specific type will be similar to a man page, with
brief descriptions.  Different MIBs such as media-specific or vendor
MIBs will be included as appropriate.  The intended audience will be
site/system managers.

Various members of the group will gather data and write some of the
summaries for the document.  H. Clark will compile the parts of the
document into Internet-Draft form.


Charter Cleanup

The dates portion of the charter will be changed to the following:

 March 95:  Revision of RFC 1404 submitted as an RFC
            Client-Server document submitted as an RFC
            Internet-Draft of SNMP User's Guide complete

  July 95:  SNMP User's Guide submitted as an RFC