Hi Jay,
As several other folks commented in the subsequent thread to your original
note (below) it's important not to unduly CONSTRAIN the system administrator
about the content of this 'printer name' object. But, I would suggest
you remove the use of the word 'arbitrary' and (since you are simply
adding a name column to the 'hrDeviceTable' for printer rows), saying
something like:
"...The value of this object SHALL be any human-readable string which
uniquely identifies this (printer device) row in the Device Table of the
Host Resources MIB. This value SHOULD contain a 'printer name' which
is actually meaningful and useful in the local network environment."
Change my UPPERCASE verbs to lowercase. They are there for emphasis on
the suggested compliance requirements (shall) and recommendations (should).
With respect to the possibility, when several 'printer devices' are on a
single host system, of requiring that system's management agent to reject
any attempt to set one 'printer device' name to the same value already
in use by another 'printer device', I would suggest the following:
"Conforming SNMP management stations shall NOT set two different 'printer
devices' within the same local network environment to the same administrative
name. Conforming SNMP management agents should reject such erroneous and
undesirable name collisions, if and when they are able to detect their
occurrence."
Cheers,
- Ira McDonald
High North Inc
PS - I'm fascinated to hear what you thought of the 'bake-off' event. I
suspect that the apparent variability of implementation choices for the
'hrDeviceStatus', 'hrPrinterStatus', and 'hrPrinterDetectedErrorState'
objects has you concerned. But in another sense, the 'bake-off' has to
be considered a 'success', because a number of vendors brought live stuff
together into one room and made a real effort to understand each other's
implementation choices.
>----------------------------------------------------------------------<
>Date: Thu, 1 Aug 1996 15:41:00 PDT
>From: jkm at underscore.com (JK Martin)
>Subject: Draft of the new prtGeneralPrinterName MIB object
>To: pwg at pwg.org>>Following is a draft of the proposed new Printer MIB object describing
>the "administrative name" of the printer, as discussed at the recent
>PWG July meeting.
>> prtGeneralPrinterName OBJECT-TYPE
> SYNTAX OCTET STRING (SIZE(0..63))
> MAX-ACCESS read-write
> MIN-ACCESS read-only
> STATUS current
> DESCRIPTION
> "The administrative name of the printer. This name is
> primarily used to distinguish between multiple printers
> listed in the Host Resources MIB device table. The value
> of this object can be any arbitrary string as long as it
> is unique among all other instances within the Host Resources
> MIB device table. Examples of this name might be `ps1',
> `Marketing Printer #1', `XYZ456-2' or any name an administrator
> would use to refer to the printer within a given environment."
> ::= { prtGeneralEntry 14 }
>>>Any help on improving the DESCRIPTION clause would be appreciated!
>>I am suggesting a max length of 63 bytes, but have no problem with a
>different value as long as it's not TOO small; I think this value
>should be allowed to be at least 31 bytes.
>> ...jay
>----------------------------------------------------------------------<