CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_ Reported by Frank Kastenholz/Clearpoint Research Corp Minutes of the Ethernet MIB Working Group (ETHERMIB) The Ethernet MIB Working Group met at the Santa Fe IETF meeting on Thursday, November 21, 1991. The first order of business was to review the administrative issues surrounding the Working Group: 1. The charter and the ``Pax Davin'' were reviews and discussed at length. The fact that we will strictly adhere to the rules of charter and the ``Pax Davin'' was openly discussed and agreed to by all present. 2. The Working Group decided to try to have the documents required by the charter ready for publication at the same time as the MIB is put forward for Draft Standard status. This would be in about 6 months. These two documents are: (a) An explanation for the assignment of MANDATORY status to optional 802.3 variables, and (b) An implementation report on the MIB variables. (c) A mailing list will need to be created. [This has been done -- enet_mib@europa.clearpoint.com.] After discussing administrative issues, the Working Group turned its attention to the MIB itself. The following items were discussed (thanks to Anil Rijsinghani of DEC for his notes of the meeting). Any changes to the MIB will be made to the version to be put forward for DRAFT STANDARD status. 1. The Working Group discussed the text in the MIB which allows an implementation to return 0 for counters for which the underlying events are not counted. It was realized that this wording makes it impossible to disambiguate the two cases of not implementing a counter and and 0 occurences of the underlying event. The Working Group discussed the issue and a vote was taken on it. The group decided to remove the offending text from the document. The Working Group realized that for variables to which this text applies, there are four alternatives which should apply: 1 (a) Delete the variable from the MIB entirely as its utility has not been demonstrated by wide implementation experience, (b) Move the variable into a separate optional MIB Group, (c) The implementor must figure out some way to support the variable, and (d) The implementor would not implement the variable, return noSuchName errors whenever the variable is accessed and not claim compliance to the MIB. 2. The possibility of an 802.3 specific (as opposed to DIX Ethernet specific or common to both) mib group was discussed. It was decided to continue this discussion on the mailing list. 3. The dot3StatsExcessiveDeferrals object is implemented in only one chip out of 14 studied by Anil Rijsinghani. It should either be made optional or removed from the MIB. The other mandatory objects are implementable with commonly available chips and supporting software. This will be considered for further study on the mailing list. 4. The TDR definition in the MIB is not sufficient, given that IEEE 802.3 does not define this object. It does not describe the two conditions under which the object is defined, and how to distinguish between them (short and open cable faults). Anil Rijsinghani will contribute text to clarify this. Attendees Steve Alexander stevea@i88.isc.com Miriam Amos Nihart miriam@decwet.zso.dec.com James Barnes barnes@xylogics.com Steve Bostock steveb@novell.com Jack Brown jbrown@huachuca-emh8.army.mil Theodore Brunner tob@thumper.bellcore.com Philip Budne phil@shiva.com Jeffrey Buffum buffum@vos.stratus.com James Codespote jpcodes@tycho.ncsc.mil Tracy Cox tacox@sabre.bellcore.com Dave Cullerot cullerot@ctron.com James Davin jrd@ptt.lcs.mit.edu Jeff Erwin Bill Fardy fardy@ctron.com Shawn Gallagher gallagher@quiver.enet.dec.com Greg Hollingsworth gregh@mailer.jhuapl.edu William Jackson jackson@manta.nosc.mil Ole Jacobsen ole@csli.stanford.edu 2 Ronald Jacoby rj@sgi.com Satish Joshi sjoshi@synoptics.com Scott Kaplan scott@ftp.com Frank Kastenholz kasten@europa.clearpoint.com Manu Kaycee kaycee@ctron.com Mark Kepke mak@cnd.hp.com Yoav Kluger ykluger@fibhaifa.com Ron Lau rlau@synoptics.com Evan McGinnis bem@3com.com Lynn Monsanto monsanto@sun.com David Perkins dperkins@synoptics.com Anil Rijsinghani anil@levers.enet.dec.com M. Richard Rose Marshall Rose mrose@dbc.mtview.ca.us Jonathan Saperia saperia@tcpjon.enet.dec.com Mark Schaefer schaefer@davidsys.com Timon Sloane peernet!timon@uunet.uu.net Bob Stewart rlstewart@eng.xyplex.com Bruce Taber taber@interlan.com Kaj Tesink kaj@nvuxr.cc.bellcore.com Dean Throop throop@dg-rtp.dg.com Maurice Turcotte dnmrt@interlan.com Steven Waldbusser waldbusser@andrew.cmu.edu Frank Welch Jeremy Wilson June-Kang Yang natadm!yang@uunet.uu.net Wengyik Yeong yeongw@psi.com John Ziegler ziegler@artel.com 3