Re: [IETFMIBS] Message Encoding for SNMPv3

["Randy Presuhn" <randy_presuhn at mindspring.com>]

Hi -

> From: "Hamid Mukhtar" <hamid.mukhtar at gmail.com>
> To: <ietfmibs at ietf.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2009 9:54 PM
> Subject: [IETFMIBS] Message Encoding for SNMPv3
...
> I had the following query about usage of BER for SNMPv3.
> 
> Is it MANDATORY encoding for all SNMPv3 messages or it is a
> RECOMMENDED encoding.

For the transport mappings defined in RFC 3417 it is mandatory.

> In the latter case what other options do we have to encode the SNMPv3 messages.

None, unless/until someone develops & standardizes a new transport mapping.
I don't think that's terribly likely, since most energy these days is going to netconf.

> However if it is mandatory, can SNMPv3 proxy-mib be used to translate
> between different encodings

You probably already know this, but to be absolutely clear,
the MIB itself doesn't do any translation.  Translation should be a
consequence of the underlying SNMP engine mapping the wire
encoding to a common internal representation.

> (Additional parsing functionality at
> target's Message processing subsystem assumed) or SNMPv3 messages MUST
> use BER for e2e transmissions.

The question is ill-formed - Proxy (by definition) involves TWO end-to-end
transmissions - At the protocol level, the proxy is an endpoint from the
perspective of both the managing and the managed systems.  Furthermore,
the proxy forwarder (as defined in RFC 3413) uses a narrow sense
of the term proxy - please go to that document for details.

Randy