]> MAC Address as String Ericsson
scott.mansfield@ericsson.com
OPS NETMOD Working Group Internet-Draft IETF and IEEE 802.1 have different patterns for mac addresses in their respective YANG types modules. Therefore equivalent mac addresses may or may not match if a mac-address that uses the IETF datatype is compared to a mac-address that uses the IEEE datatype (and vise-versa). Discussion Venues Source for this draft and an issue tracker can be found at .
Introduction MAC Address Formats in the IETF and IEEE YANG modules are different.
Problem Statement The IETF YANG module and IEEE YANG module use a datatype of String to store MAC Addresses. The issue is that the IETF and IEEE use different patterns and have different canonical forms, which leads to a situation where equivalent MAC Addresses will not match. This internet-draft is meant to document the issue, raise awareness, and identify potential solutions. For example, the following MAC Address is in IETF Canonical Format For example, the following MAC Address is in IEEE Canonical Format The MAC Address are equivalent, but will not match if used in an XPATH, or as a key, or any string comparison. There are several potential trouble spots in published IETF YANG modules.
Detail
IETF Format The IETF Format (from ietf-yang-types@2013-07-15.yang) used in the mac-address typedef is found below.
IEEE Format The IEEE Format used in the mac-address typedef is found below.
Options
  • Create a new mac-address type and deprecate the mac-address types in IETF and IEEE types files.
  • Modify the mac-address patterns in both IETF and IEEE to be inclusive of everything, and fix the descriptions to warn the implementers about the issue with equivalence.
  • Add something to the YANG language that will provide a way to indicate an "equivalence" pattern.
  • Do what SMNP did, abandon strings and store the MAC Address as 6 octets and provide the ability to use a display hint style facility.
  • Do Nothing
  • Some other brilliant solution?
Security Considerations TODO Security
IANA Considerations This document has no IANA actions.
Informative References IEEE Standard for Local and Metropolitan Area Networks--Bridges and Bridged Networks Amendment 36: YANG Data Models for Scheduled Traffic, Frame Preemption, and Per‐Stream Filtering and Policing Common YANG Data Types This document defines a collection of common data types to be used with the YANG data modeling language. It includes several new type definitions and obsoletes RFC 6991.
Acknowledgments TODO acknowledge.