OID motion at 802 Executive Committee Meeting
802.1 Chair Tony Jeffree will make the following motion at Monday
morning's 802 ExCom meeting. I plan to vote in favor, but if you have
objections I will certainly reconsider.
Roger
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DISCUSSION
802.1 is currently developing a MIB for our Port Access Control
standard (P802.1X), and in order to complete the work, we will need
to identify a suitable Object Identifier (OID) arc to hang the MIB
under. Past practice with 802 standards that need to allocate OID
values (for MIBs and for other purposes) has been to request ANSI to
allocate an OID root on a per-standard basis; for example, 802.1B has
its own OID root, and 802.3 (for historical reasons) seems to have 2
root OIDs allocated to it.
When discussing this need relative to 802.1X, the 802.1 WG felt that
it would be a "service to the community" to request ANSI to allocate
an OID root for the whole of 802; within 802 we could then allocate
arcs off that root for any 802 working groups that do not already
have their own OID roots allocated (and to the other WGs too, if they
have a need for them), and having allocated an arc per working group,
the WG could then allocate below that arc per type of use...and so on.
To give an example of how this would work, to fix 802.1X's problem,
we would have:
ieee802 ::= { iso(1) member-body(2) us(840) xxx }
- where xxx would be allocated to IEEE 802 by ANSI.
The next arc would be defined across 802 to identify the working group:
ieee802dotN ::= { ieee802 N }
-- where N is the working group number - 1, 3, 11, 14, 15, ....etc
so for 802.1:
ieee802dot1 ::= { iee802 1 }
The next arc would be under the control of the WG, and would identify
the type of use; for example, MIBs as distinct from OSI managed
objects:
ieee802dot1mibs ::= { iee802dot1 1 }
ieee802dot1osiobjects ::= { iee802dot1 2 }
...etc.
All subsequent arcs would also be under the control of the WG. In
the case of the MIB arc, the next arc below would identify which MIB,
... and so on.
If the other WGs do not see a need for a common root OID, or prefer
to continue using their existing allocations, or prefer to request
ANSI for their own distinct OIDs, that's fine; 802.1 will request an
allocation that meets 802.1's needs only. However, as the above has
the benefit of avoiding the need for furthher requests to ANSI, it
was felt appropriate to offer the above for discussion among the WG
chairs.
MOTION:
The 802 Exec encourages 802.1 to proceed with a request to ANSI to
allocate an OID root identifier for use across the whole of 802, as
proposed in the above discussion document, and to allocate arcs under
the root assigned by ANSI for use by all 802 working groups.
Regards,
Tony