Physical Topology MIB (ptopomib) Charter


NOTE: This charter is accurate as of the 37th IETF Meeting in San Jose. It may now be out-of-date. (Consider this a "snapshot" of the working group from that meeting.) Up-to-date charters for all active working groups can be found elsewhere in this Web server.

Chair(s)

Network Management Area Director(s):

Mailing List Information

Description of Working Group

Document Editor: Gilbert Ho (Gilbert_Ho@3mail.3com.com)

The goals of this working group are:

o to agree on and document the common framework/model for discussing physical topology o to standardize a set of managed objects that provide physical topology information o to document media specific mechanisms to communicate topology information.

The managed objects should provide sufficient information to allow a management workstation to navigate across a set of agents in order to learn the topology of arbitrarily large networks, and these objects should be as independent as possible from the specific underlying networking media which comprise the network. These objects will be the minimum necessary to provide the ability to support the physical topology discovery, and will be consistent with the SNMP framework and existing SNMP standards.

In defining these objects, it is anticipated that the working group will leverage existing work for representing port-based information, such as in the Repeater MIB (RFC 1516 or later) and may also leverage work in the entity MIB for describing logical and physical relationships.

The working group will define the general requirements for topology mechanisms in order to support the proposed MIB. It will also identify existing topology mechanisms for common LAN media types and may propose new topology mechanisms for LAN media types where required. It is a goal of the common topology MIB to allow the use of either standard or proprietary topology mechanisms within the underlying media.

At this time, it is not a goal of the working group to support the collection or representation of logical topology information, such as VLAN configuration or subnet structure. It is anticipated that this could be an area for future work items, so some consideration will be given to extensibility of the models and to the MIB. However, this consideration must not be allowed to impede progress on the primary focus of physical connectivity.

Goals and Milestones

Oct 96
Working Group formation approved by IESG Solicit input (proprietary MIBs, model)
Nov 96
Post Internet-Draft for topology model
Nov 96
Hold Interim meeting in San Jose
Nov 96
Post Internet-Draft for topology MIB
Dec 96
Working Group meeting at IETF-San Jose to review the initial IDs
Feb 97
Post revised Internet-Draft(s)
Mar 97
Review Internet-Draft(s) at IETF meeting
Jun 97
Submit final version of Internet-Draft(s) to IESG for consideration as a Proposed Standard

No Current Internet-Drafts

No Request for Comments