A question

[Frank Fock]

Alex,

This section has been frequently abused by SNMP agent implementors.
However, why should returning such an error on an object that currently
does not exists (because it cannot be retrieved) be an advantage for
the management system (and its operator)?. IMHO there are only
disadvantages:

- The management system cannot determine the next OID where it
could continue retrieving the table.
- The management sytem has to resend its request, which causes
additional overhead.
- When returning an error also all the other values in that request
have to be rerequested.

Just an opinion.

Best regards,
Frank

Alex Finogenov wrote:

> Frank,
>
> Why? RFC1905 in Section 4.2.2 states:
>
> ...
> If the processing of any variable binding fails for a reason other
>    than listed above, then the Response-PDU is re-formatted with the
>    same values in its request-id and variable-bindings fields as the
>    received GetNextRequest-PDU, with the value of its error-status field
>    set to `genErr', and the value of its error-index field is set to the
>    index of the failed variable binding.
>
> I believe that the failures I am describing fall under this category, so it
> is OK to return GenErr. It is obviously an agent's implementation detail
> what the agent does after sending the GenErr reply.
>
> Thanks,
> Alex