Document: draft-ietf-idr-bgp-mibagent-survey-01
Reviewer: Michael Patton
Date: July 21, 2004

Summary: This draft is on the right track but has open issues,
	 described in the review.

Overview: While this document may well be accurate for what it
includes, it does not, in my opinion, actually document any
interoperability.  As someone whose main job is in this sphere, I do
think that these implementations do meet the interoperability
requirement.  It's just that the information in this document does not
substantiate that.


Details
-------

The wording of the Abstract is pretty sketchy and contains references.
If I understand, what it really says is just:

   This document provides a survey of SNMP agents implementing the
   BGP-4 MIB as specified in RFC1657 and updated by RFCxxxx.

With the xxxx to be filled in by RFCed with whatever
draft-ietf-idr-bgp4-mib-14.txt gets published as.

But the introduction then claims it's for RFC1657 only without the
updates.  And the body seems to go along with that.  So maybe what the
abstract should say is:

   This document provides a survey of SNMP agents implementing the
   BGP-4 MIB as specified in RFC1657.

or the Introduction and the relevant parts of the body also need
updating.

Note that draft-ietf-idr-bgp4-mib-14.txt claims there are errors in
RFC1657 and that it corrects them.  That means this distinction is
important!  RFC1657 is already DS, if the point of documenting
implementations is to move to full Standard, do we actually want to be
documenting interoperation of a known defective version.  I didn't
review the actual MIB, so I don't know what the changes were, but it
seems to me that a change should require the new one to come out at DS
(or even PS, if the changes are significant) and then get
interoperability of _that_ specification to move it to Standard.



Section 2 has several references to "section 1.x" but neither this
draft nor RFC1657 has any such sections.  These references need better
resolution.

The first sentence of the second paragraph of section 2 is incomplete.
I think it may have just lost one word after the section reference.
But since I can't resolve these references, I can't understand the
rest of the paragraph, and thus have no idea what it should actually
be.


At the end of 2.1 "Please note ... are deprecated." needs a reference
for where they are deprecated.  And I have no idea what the second
sentence here is saying or why it's there.


I'm not sure I really grok the tables in Section 2.5, but I think it's
telling me that each of the agents was tested against only one
manager, and no two against the same manager.  While the manager used
to test each agent may have been implemented independently, they
almost certainly tested their own agent/manager for interoperability.
I guess this meets the letter of the law on interoperability, but I'd
prefer to see cross-tests as well before I really accept that
interoperability has really been achieved.  By extrapolation back to
this section from the later---more detailed---sections, it seems that
each agent was only tested against the one that was used in its
implementation, which I'm pretty sure is not the spirit of the
interoperability requirement, even if it does meet the letter...