There has been an increasing amount of work recently on taking MIBs
defined by other organizations (e.g., the IEEE) and de-osifying them
for use with the Internet-standard network management framework. The
steps to achieve this are straight-forward, though tedious. Of
course, it is helpful to already be experienced in writing MIB
modules for use with the Internet-standard network management
framework.
The first step is to construct a skeletal MIB module, e.g.,
RFC1213-MIB DEFINITIONS ::= BEGIN
IMPORTS
experimental, OBJECT-TYPE, Counter
FROM RFC1155-SMI;
-- contact IANA for actual number
root OBJECT IDENTIFIER ::= { experimental xx }
END
The next step is to categorize the objects into groups. For
experimental MIBs, optional objects are permitted. However, when a
MIB module is placed in the Internet-standard space, these optional
objects are either removed, or placed in a optional group, which, if
implemented, all objects in the group must be implemented. For the
first pass, it is wisest to simply ignore any optional objects in the
original MIB: experience shows it is better to define a core MIB
module first, containing only essential objects; later, if experience
demands, other objects can be added.
It must be emphasized that groups are "units of conformance" within a
MIB: everything in a group is "mandatory" and implementations do
either whole groups or none.
