Subject: Re: Disman issue Event-05

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 30 Aug 1999 14:27:52 -0400

>  Error handling is by notification.  This may appear to violate the
>  principle that notifications are to be avoided since they may be lost or
>  become burdensome.  These error notifications should be enabled only for
>  the diagnosis of problems indicated by error counters.  Furthermore,
>  if notifications loss is a concern they should be directed to a log
>  as described in the Notification Log MIB [rfcNotificationLogMIB].
>  Note that this does
>
>Comments?

The wording looks fine.  However, there's one RFC-editorial question
that I've heard raised and discussed a number of times, but never
really answered:  Should these "should"'s be "SHOULD"'s?

Regards,
Bob

Bob Moore
IBM Networking Software
+1-919-254-4436
[email-masked]

---

From: Jon Saperia <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Aug 1999 19:51:21 -0400

> really answered:  Should these "should"'s be "SHOULD"'s?

I am sorry, my initial comment was not clear.  My point was to make a
distinction for INFORMS which are confirmed. While a single datagram can
be lost, a system which generates them can take care of the
retransmission.  In practice this seems fine.  

I avoided the temptation to tinker too much with the wording here but as
an aside I would not put in a sentence that said "notifications are to
be avoided since they may be lost or become burdensome."  If the former
is a concern, use INFORMS which was my point (though I would love live
operational data about the loss of a single specific TRAP causing a
problem).  If the latter, concern about saturation of the net with too
many TRAPS or INFORMS, then speak to the vendor who provided a system
without enough smarts and kick them in the pants.  This is bad
implementation and has little to do with the protocol.  

/jon