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OID motion at 802 Executive Committee Meeting




802.1 Chair Tony Jeffree will make the following motion at Monday 
morning's 802 ExCom meeting. I plan to vote in favor, but if you have 
objections I will certainly reconsider.

Roger

----------------------------------------------------
DISCUSSION

802.1 is currently developing a MIB for our Port Access Control 
standard (P802.1X), and in order to complete the work, we will need 
to identify a suitable Object Identifier (OID) arc to hang the MIB 
under.  Past practice with 802 standards that need to allocate OID 
values (for MIBs and for other purposes) has been to request ANSI to 
allocate an OID root on a per-standard basis; for example, 802.1B has 
its own OID root, and 802.3 (for historical reasons) seems to have 2 
root OIDs allocated to it.

When discussing this need relative to 802.1X, the 802.1 WG felt that 
it would be a "service to the community" to request ANSI to allocate 
an OID root for the whole of 802; within 802 we could then allocate 
arcs off that root for any 802 working groups that do not already 
have their own OID roots allocated (and to the other WGs too, if they 
have a need for them), and having allocated an arc per working group, 
the WG could then allocate below that arc per type of use...and so on.

To give an example of how this would work, to fix 802.1X's problem, 
we would have:

ieee802 ::= { iso(1) member-body(2) us(840) xxx } 
  - where xxx would be allocated to IEEE 802 by ANSI.

The next arc would be defined across 802 to identify the working group:

	ieee802dotN ::= { ieee802 N }
	-- where N is the working group number - 1, 3, 11, 14, 15, ....etc

so for 802.1:
	ieee802dot1 ::= { iee802 1 }

The next arc would be under the control of the WG, and would identify 
the type of use; for example, MIBs as distinct from OSI managed 
objects:

	ieee802dot1mibs ::= { iee802dot1 1 }
	ieee802dot1osiobjects ::= { iee802dot1 2 }
	...etc.

All subsequent arcs would also be under the control of the WG.  In 
the case of the MIB arc, the next arc below would identify which MIB, 
... and so on.

If the other WGs do not see a need for a common root OID, or prefer 
to continue using their existing allocations, or prefer to request 
ANSI for their own distinct OIDs, that's fine; 802.1 will request an 
allocation that meets 802.1's needs only.  However, as the above has 
the benefit of  avoiding the need for furthher requests to ANSI, it 
was felt appropriate to offer the above for discussion among the WG 
chairs.

MOTION:

The 802 Exec encourages 802.1 to proceed with a request to ANSI to 
allocate an OID root identifier for use across the whole of 802, as 
proposed in the above discussion document, and to allocate arcs under 
the root assigned by ANSI for use by all 802 working groups.

Regards,
Tony