Re: [IETFMIBS] Message Encoding for SNMPv3

[Juergen Schoenwaelder <j.schoenwaelder at jacobs-university.de>]

On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 04:55:14PM +0900, Hamid Mukhtar wrote:
 
> RFC 3413 in its section 3.5 identifies four basic types of proxy
> forwarder applications. 

No. It talks about four basic types of messages (PDU classes). There
is only a single forwarder application as far as I can tell.

> You specified that the proxy forwarder (as defined in RFC 3413) uses
> a "narrow sense" of the term proxy. For my understanding I just need
> to clarify what you mean by narrow sense. Do you mean that the only
> translation a proxy forwarder can do as an intermediate entity is
> between SNMP versions. Thus the SNMPv3 proxy forwarders cannot be
> used to translate between SNMP and non-SNMP protocols (for instance
> a protocol which uses XML instead of BER encoding).

The encoding of messages is a property of the transports. A proxy
simply relays messages and does not know about their encoding. So in
order to change the encoding, you have to relay messages through a
different transport. In other words, once you have new transport with
a new encoding, everything else will be in place.

That said, I agree with those who believe establishing a new transport
for the sake of changing the encoding is a waste of efforts. But if
you want to dig further, you definately should look at the ISMS work,
in particular <draft-ietf-isms-tmsm-16.txt>.

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder           Jacobs University Bremen gGmbH
Phone: +49 421 200 3587         Campus Ring 1, 28759 Bremen, Germany
Fax:   +49 421 200 3103         <http://www.jacobs-university.de/>