CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_ Reported by Nevil Brownlee/University of Auckland Minutes of the Operational Statistics Working Group (OPSTAT) Agenda o RFC 1404 (rewrite of RFC and BNF) o Client-server Draft o SNMP Users Guide o Charter Cleanup An introduction and overview of previous OPSTAT activities and the current drafts was done by N. Brownlee. RFC 1404 Update There are currently four known RFC 1404 implementations (Brownlee, Clark, PSC and Sprint). Michael Lambert at PSC has revised RFC 1404 by integrating the revised BNF and making other grammatical cleanups. The BNF itself has had no substantive changes since the last IETF (really, only cleanup of the BNF text was done). As a result of some discussions on the mailing list, text will be added to specifically prohibit any ASCII control characters (i.e. ASCII 0x00 - 0x1f) within an ASCII-STRING. Finally, text will be added to eliminate any ambiguity associated with attempting to specify variables within a tag not specifically associated with an interface (the SNMP IP and TCP groups are examples). Client-Server Draft Three outstanding issues were discussed about the Client-Server draft. First, text will be included to ensure that ASCII control characters cannot be part of an ASCII-STRING definition. Second, all commands which refer to a tag will be changed to only refer to specific variables (e.g., SELECT). This change clarifies exactly what data you are retrieving from the server (with a TAG, you might have unintentionally retrieved much more data than you intended). Finally, an aggregation field will be added to the SELECT command so that a user could request the server to aggregate data (say, from 1 minute data to 15 minute data). The aggregator verbs in RFC 1404 (TOTAL and PEAK) will be supported. SNMP User's Guide A new document will be created to address concerns about what SNMP (and other) variables should be queried on a device, what resultant values are meaningful, and other useful advice about management data. The types of things to be included will be: o Minimum/typical/maximum set of variables that should be queried (along with hints about polling frequency) o Typical and error values for the variable o Common failure modes and ways of determining said failure from the variables This data will be collected for common media types (serial lines, ethernet, etc.) as well as common vendor equipment (e.g., routers). The format of each specific type will be similar to a man page, with brief descriptions. Different MIBs such as media-specific or vendor MIBs will be included as appropriate. The intended audience will be site/system managers. Various members of the group will gather data and write some of the summaries for the document. H. Clark will compile the parts of the document into Internet-Draft form. Charter Cleanup The dates portion of the charter will be changed to the following: March 95: Revision of RFC 1404 submitted as an RFC Client-Server document submitted as an RFC Internet-Draft of SNMP User's Guide complete July 95: SNMP User's Guide submitted as an RFC