Question regarding indexes in Mib tables.

[Frank Fock]

Hi Paresh,

Paresh Borkar wrote:
> Thanks.
> 
> One thing I notice with this index generation technique is that index would always be a number dotted
> sequence. And the same would be displayed when I walk the mib table. It is not readable, when the
> string as part of the index is displayed as a number dotted sequence. Would this always be the case?

No. Of course not. For example MIB Explorer converts them back
to native representation, as you can see from these screen shots:

http://www.mibexplorer.com/features/MIBExplorerInstances.jpg
http://www.mibexplorer.com/features/features.html

With MIB Explorer, an user may even edit index values in
native representation which is not common practice for generic
SNMP tools.

> Does some RFC enforce it to be this way?
> 
No. The SNMP standard only requires that table index values
have to be OIDs with not more than 128 sub-identifier
(more precisly said: the number of sub-identifiers of the
columnar object and its index must not exceed 128). In addition,
sub-identifiers cannot be negative, so only unsigned integer
values, IP addresses, and Strings may be used in as subindexes.

> Also,  please could you point me to the RFC which talks about the IMPLIED keyword.
>
http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2578.txt


Best regards,
Frank