PMP Mail Archive: Re: PMP> Revised proposal on definition of OCTET STRING to allow superset of ASCII

Re: PMP> Revised proposal on definition of OCTET STRING to allow superset of ASCII

Ira Mcdonald x10962 (imcdonal@eso.mc.xerox.com)
Tue, 22 Jul 1997 15:06:33 PDT

According to Chris Wellens, the HR MIB (as is, based on considerable
interoperability testing among implementors) actually IS moving to
Draft Standard status on a fast track - this will be worked on
during August - Chris mentioned this on a phone conversation with
me early in June - I hope she doesn't mind my repeating it - the
essence of the thing is that the HR MIB (perhaps not for printer
folks) has proved so useful 'as is' that they should advance
it (perhaps with updated enums for storage and device types??)
to Draft and THEN consider any extensions by new object groups.

In any case, a number of other IETF standards track MIBs have
imported and used the 'InternationalDisplayString' textual
convention defined in the IETF HR MIB (RFC 1514), to mean
precisely what we're talking about now - relatively static
locale for a large number of site-specific string objects
(some or all with 'read-write' rather than 'read-only' MAX-ACCESS).

Damning the HR MIB as questionable is fairly absurd for a printer
working group who have a MIB with primary indices of 'hrDeviceIndex'
in all tables. At Xerox, everything built in the last year has
some or all of the IETF HR MIB tables in use. Maybe the
deficient printer status variables have blinded PWG folks to
the real utility of the HR MIB for network products (for service
and customer SA setup purposes).

Cheers,
- Ira McDonald (outside consultant at Xerox)