Hi -
On 12/16/2016 12:53 AM, Martin Bjorklund wrote:
Randy Presuhn <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi -
My recollection is that part of the motivation for the use of
zero-length strings as sentinel values in situations like this
in MIB modules (rather than skipping the object instance) was
to permit a clear distinction between "information not available"
and "access denied".
Ok. But if this is an important use case, maybe we should try to have
generic support for it, instead of using special values. Not all
types have a natural value for "not available".
Just providing background. I don't know whether the distinction is
needed in netconf-managed environments.
I think that people often used these kinds of constructs in MIBs
to avoid "holes" in the tables; I don't know if that applied to this
MIB though.
I think the fear of holes belongs in the "folklore" category.
Due to the way access control works in SNMP, holes in tables
are always a possibility when retrieving information. Employing
sentinel values can't change that reality. However, for some
objects (by no means all) the distinction between "I don't know"
and "I won't tell you" was important to SNMP-based management.
Whether this is also true in netconf-land is a another question.
Randy
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