Brett Lymn <blymn@baesystems.com.au> writes:
> On Wed, Oct 17, 2007 at 10:22:39PM +0000, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
> > > 
> > That comes back to the question of the purpose.  I, for example, want
> > to be able to read battery serial numbers, so I can track their
> > performance over time via envstat.  
> 
> Broadly, the benefit I can see is that you can pull out the hardware
> platform information.  With respect, this probably does not mean much
> to the hobby or small network user who can probably reel off the build
> of their machines from memory but in a larger, distributed network it
> can be really handy when the finance fixed assets people want to know
> exactly what machines are in the company.

Maybe the kernel framework should be made powerful enough that it
could support an implementation of e.g. the Entities MIB (rfc
4133) (or the Host resources MIB (rfc 2790))?  Granted, far from
all systems running NetBSD will be able to fill in all the
fields, but some might (some day?).

					-jarle