CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_ Reported by Bob Stewart/Xyplex CHARMIB Minutes The Character MIB Working Group held its third meeting at the IETF meeting in Boulder. The meeting was well attended, with representatives of many terminal server companies and other interested parties. Overall, the meeting showed good consensus and resulted in the completion of the business at hand. As a result, following edits based on the meeting and summarized below, we have three MIB drafts that are ready for initial implementation. Agenda o Discuss the Following Three Internet Drafts. - draft-ietf-charmib-charmib-00.txt - draft-ietf-charmib-rs232like-00.txt - draft-ietf-charmib-parallelprinter-00.txt o Discuss Implementation Plans. We discussed the issue of permanent versus operational database. We decided to leave such a distinction as implementation specific and to say so in the specification. This general issue was to be mentioned in the SNMP meeting. We discussed the approach to action variables (such as charPortReset). The specific questions were whether the apparent autoreset of the value is acceptable, and why not use a write-only value. The editor explained that the approach in the specification was taken after recommendations from some of the SNMP gurus on the mailing list. The Chair is to obtain official experimental MIB object identifier numbers for the three MIBs. The group would like a better understanding of the life cycle of an experimental MIB. So would the Chair. We discussed the life cycle of a charPortIndex as compared to an ifIndex. They're basically the same, with the same restrictions, which 1 have been discussed quite thoroughly in the greater SNMP context. We decided to count the BREAK condition as a character on the basis that it is a significant event on the data lines. Furthermore, the character counters are to include all characters, such as XON and XOFF. We decided to add charLastChange, to operate similarly to ifLastChange. We decided to add charPortSessionMaximum to indicate the maximum number of sessions allowed on the port. A value of -1 indicates no maximum. Setting the maximum to less than the current number of sessions has unspecified results. In page-by-page review, we agreed on the following specific edits to the Character MIB: o Page 7, remove the double negative in the second full sentence. No change of meaning. o Page 11, charPortIndex description ``network management system'' becomes ``network management agent''. The same change applies to the other two MIBs. o Page 12 and page 17, charPortReset and charSessKill, add ``in response to a get-request or get-next-request'' to statement on returning ``ready''. o Page 12, charPortAdminStatus and charPortOperStatus, change ``test'' to ``maintenance'' and use test as an example. o Page 17, remove charSessName. o Page 18, remove ``active'' from charSessState. o Page 18, change type of charSessProtocol to OBJECT IDENTIFIER and define values for existing list plus local. o Page 19, remove charSessRemoteName. o Page 19, charSessConnectionId, indicate that the object identifier should point to the highest available related MIB, such as Telnet if available. Page-by-page reviews of the RS-232 and Parallel MIBs resulted in no edits. 2 We discussed the parity, framing, and overrun counters in the RS-232 MIB, and decided to keep them as they are. In a quick, informal poll of who had implementation intentions, positive responses were obtained from Hughes LAN Systems, Digital Equipment Corporation, Datability, Xylogics, and Xyplex. 3 Attendees Anne Ambler anne@spider.co.uk Anthony Chung anthony@hls.com Jim Reinstedler jimr@ub.com Bob Stewart rlstewart@eng.xyplex.com Ron Strich ssds!rons@uunet.uu.net Emil Sturniolo Laszlo Szerenyi William Townsend townsend@xylogics.com David Waitzman djw@bbn.com Jesse Walker walker@eider.enet@decpa.dec.com 4