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Physical Topology MIB
charter-ietf-ptopomib-01

Document Charter Physical Topology MIB WG (ptopomib)
Title Physical Topology MIB
Last updated 2000-10-03
State Approved
WG State Concluded
IESG Responsible AD (None)
Charter edit AD (None)
Send notices to (None)

charter-ietf-ptopomib-01

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.