Subject: PMP> prtAlert...Events justification

From: Bob Pentecost <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Feb 1997 10:12:19 -0700

One of my action items from the January meeting was to provide the 
justification for the objects prtAlertCriticalEvents and prtAlertAllEvents 
that have been added to the Printer MIB. I offer the following:

The objects prtAlertCriticalEvents and prtAlertAllEvents have been added to 
allow management application to easily determine if there has been a change 
to the alert table. Without these counters, the entire alert table must be 
read and parsed to determine if the state of the printer has changed. By 
using these objects it can quickly be determined whether or not there has 
been any change since these objects were last read, and which class, 
critical or not, has changed.

It was pointed out to me (thanks Gail) that hrDeviceErrors is "The number 
of errors detected on this device." Unfortunately, it does not specify what 
is to be counted as an error. For the LaserJet 5Si, we count critical 
errors, but another implementation could count all errors. By have 
separate, well defined objects, we can avoid the ambiguity.

Bob Pentecost
HP