Subject: TCP-MIB update

From: Bill Fenner <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2001 08:29:31 -0700

FYI, the IPv6 MIB design team, chartered under the IPNG WG, is revising
the IP/UDP/TCP MIBs.  I'd like to solicit input from implementors on:

- The idea of creating a seperate listening table, instead of using the
  convention of an all-zeroes remote address
- Additional counters that would be useful

Thanks,

  Bill

----- Begin forwarded message:

From: [email-masked]
Subject: I-D ACTION:draft-ietf-ipngwg-rfc2012-update-00.txt
Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2001 06:57:34 -0400
To: IETF-Announce: ;
Cc: [email-masked]
Reply-to: [email-masked]

	Title		: Management Information Base for the Transmission 
                          Control Protocol (TCP)
	Author(s)	: B. Fenner et al.
	Filename	: draft-ietf-ipngwg-rfc2012-update-00.txt
	Pages		: 21
	Date		: 17-Jul-01
	
This memo defines a portion of the Management Information Base (MIB) for
use with network management protocols in the Internet community.  In
particular, it describes managed objects used for implementations of the
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) [5] in an IP version independent
manner.

A URL for this Internet-Draft is:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-ipngwg-rfc2012-update-00.txt

Internet-Drafts are also available by anonymous FTP. Login with the username
"anonymous" and a password of your e-mail address. After logging in,
type "cd internet-drafts" and then
	"get draft-ietf-ipngwg-rfc2012-update-00.txt".

A list of Internet-Drafts directories can be found in
http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html 
or ftp://ftp.ietf.org/ietf/1shadow-sites.txt

----- End forwarded message:

---

From: Simon Leinen <[email-masked]>
Date: 18 Jul 2001 22:13:53 +0200

>>>>> "bf" == Bill Fenner <[email-masked]> writes:

(What kind of implementor do I have to be in order to make my
contribution eligible for consideration? I only implement networks,
and sometimes management tools, but no TCP stacks.  Hope you don't
mind my intrusion :-)

> - The idea of creating a seperate listening table, instead of using
>   the convention of an all-zeroes remote address

I like it.  Most management applications that I can think of handle
listening and non-listening sockets, ehm, TCP endpoints, separately,
so having them in separate tables would (1) simplify those
applications (2) make them more efficient because they don't have to
skip inappropriate rows and (3) remove the all-zeroes remote address
convention.  Whether that is sufficient justification for the new
approach I don't know.

> - Additional counters that would be useful

Per-connection input/output octet counters would have been extremely
useful to me sometimes, when trying to look at data rates within
distributed applications that use TCP.

Of course there are many other per-connection things that you could
count (such as segments, retransmissions, duplicate acks, misordered
segments...) or track (such as window sizes, MSS, whether the
connection uses SACK, ECN, timestamps, window scaling etc.).  It would
be nice to have all of these accessible via SNMP, but the octet
counters are the one thing I have actually missed a couple of times.
-- 
Simon Leinen				       [email-masked]
SWITCH				   http://www.switch.ch/misc/leinen/

	       Computers hate being anthropomorphized.