CURRENT MEETING REPORT Minutes of the Uninterruptible Power Supply MIB Working Group (UPSMIB) Reported by Jeff Case The UPS MIB Working Group met on Monday, December 4, 1995, at the 34th Meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force, in Dallas, Texas, USA. The meeting began with a brief review of the charter and the state of the Working Group because the Working Group had recently been rechartered and because there were several new faces at the meeting. The current tasks for the Working Group are related to preparing a recommendation with respect to the advancement of the UPS MIB from Proposed Standard to Draft Standard. To that end, we are to: a) prepare implementation reports to document the existence of multiple interoperable implementations; and b) update the specification, if necessary, to address any problems identified in those implementation reports. After this work is completed, additional work items, such as redundant UPSes, switched outlets, etc, can be considered. Several attendees gave initial implementation reports at the meeting. Ron Pitt of Deltec/Fiskars reported on their box-based proxy agent implementation for a wide range of UPS sizes and on their management application for use with ManageWise. His experience is that there is a clear delineation between the requirements for two contact (subset) and full serial implementations but that the differences between the basic and advanced (full) compliance groups is not nearly so clear or helpful. He also reported that the spinlock is a problem. [ Ed note: it has also subsequently been pointed out (during the editing of these minutes) that RFC 1628 is not self-consistent in the naming of the groups -- they are called upsSubset, upsBasic, and upsFull in one location but called subset, basic, and advanced in another. These vestigial artifacts of an incomplete name change in an earlier draft should be fixed in the next release. ] A team of people reported on implementations of an HP manager application and MG agents. The manager application works with MG agents only. The intent was to do an open implementation of RFC 1628 that would work with any compliant implementation, but it was found that different UPSes do different things when given the same command. For example, some believe that utility failure is an example of a class of problems which are typical of a larger class of potential interoperability problems resulting in different events for the same conditions. Some attendees seemed to think that "topology-based" conformance may be one way to resolve the problems but there was no consensus about what this meant nor if it would in fact resolve the problems. Several people agreed with the need for a way to specify trap destinations in that most implementers had made their own private extensions in this area. Schneider Electric gave an implementation report. They have implemented agents, both as dedicated devices and as proxies. They are interested in the protection of the customer and believe that configuration of the shutdown process needs more attention. Oneac reported on their implementation, which is inside the box, and aligns with the full compliance (advanced) specification. APC's implementation report echoed some of the earlier comments and stated that there needs to me more attention given to sizes, rounding, and reboot time. Exide's implementation report echoed some of the earlier comments. A short time was was spent on general discussion of several topics including reliable traps, expansion of the management aspect, and survivability. However, time limitations precluded any meaningful conclusions. The Chair attempted to probe the level of changes which are necessary in order for the document to be republished. The result was difficult to quantify, but the group's conclusion was that the document is generally ok, but that there are many areas where additional polish is needed. The group is motivated to keep changes to a minimum, in part because there some attendees have strong interest in new work on additional MIB objects in additional functional areas.