Subject: Re: 'vendor' top-level MIB for sysctl
To: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>
From: Bill Sommerfeld <sommerfeld@orchard.arlington.ma.us>
List: tech-kern
Date: 12/28/2000 08:32:09
frank wrote:
> | There was a question from a vendor using NetBSD the other day, who
> | was in need of a sysctl MIB for local use. The suggested top-level
> | name was 'vendor', to be used only by vendor-extensions to NetBSD.

It would be useful to have an idea of what exactly they want to stuff
in there.

"local" might be a more appropriate name than "vendor"

jhawk wrote:
> I think it would be best to go with your alternative, and require
> vendor OIDs to be registered IANA enterprise numbers, cf.
> http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/enterprise-numbers
> this outsources the registration.

I do not think that we should do >>anything<< to encourage confusion
between the space of values which are settable through sysctl and the
space of values settable in an SNMP ASN.1 MIB.

Given the current state of the sysctl implementation, stuffing in
enterprise numbers is tantamount to massive over-engineering.

The current sysctl implementation is (a) not very extensible, (b)
assumes that the set of labels for any given MIB prefix is a small,
more-or-less contiguous number space (not true for the IANA enterprise
space), and (c) compiles the textual form of the MIB into the
"/usr/sbin/sysctl" program and the numeric form into the kernel so it
has to match in both places.

						- Bill