Re: Important question about draft-ietf-ipsec-doi-tc-mib-07.txt

[Wes Hardaker <hardaker@tislabs.com>]

>>>>> On Fri, 18 Apr 2003 04:44:04 -0700 (PDT), "C. M. Heard" <heard@pobox.com> said:

Wes> In fact, the agent that receives a value outside the legal range
Wes> of values will already have to return the exact same error to
Wes> the management app that sent an illegal value in the first
Wes> place.

C> Depending on what you mean by "the legal range of values" this can
C> be a problem.  If you mean "the values in the enum list that are
C> know to the agent" (which is the behaviour mandated by RFC 2578
C> Section 7.1.1) then this IS a problem because for the DOI TCs the
C> agent should ACCEPT any value that is within the range defined for
C> the underlying protocol data item if (a) it does not require special
C> knowledge on the part of the agent to process it or (b) it is in the
C> "private use" range and the agent knows what to do with it.  Note
C> that in the latter case in particular, the value is _valid_ even
C> though it does not appear in the enum list.  Now, one could code
C> around this problem, but that won't be conformant to RFC 2578
C> Section 7.1.1, which says that "only those named-numbers so
C> enumerated may be present as a value."

Ok, then how about changing my suggestion to:

  As described in RFC 2407 section 4.4.1, the range of values that
  will be assigned by IANA for use in this TEXTUAL-CONVENTION and the
  IPsec DOI will fall between 0 and 248, while legal values on the
  wire may fall between 0 and 255.  Values in the range 249-255 will
  not be utilized within IETF standardization documents as they have
  been reserved by the IPsec DOI for private use by cooperating
  devices.  All use of deviations from the standardized list of
  enumerations, including those that fall in the 249-255 range, must
  be documented within the appropriate AGENT-CAPABILITIES statements.

This documents that values from 249-255 won't be standardized, are
intended for use by private organizations, and finally reminds the
agent implementers that these other accepted/used values must be
documented in the standard way in which all agents are supposed to
document their deviation from a standardized SMIv2 document.
-- 
Wes Hardaker
Network Associates Laboratories