On Fri, 31 Mar 2006 17:55:06 -0800, jonathan@dsg.stanford.edu wrote:

> 
> And some folks find it objectionable. Next point?
> 
Let's look at it another way.  People want the ability to issue some
command at a certain point in time, then see what the deltas are in
counters since that point.  They also want to do it without installing
things like snmp agents, partly because of complexity and partly
because they (like I) may run some network tests in single-user mode.

From that perspective, either zeroing the counters or checkpointing
them is reasonable.  In general, I'm of the "give them enough rope"
school of thought, but since checkpointing is strictly more powerful at
only a slight increase in complexity (the need to specify an extra
option when querying) it's probably the right solution.

		--Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb