Cameron Laird's personal notes on SNMP
More updates coming in mid-May 1999.
SNMP is an acronym for Simple
Network Management
Protocol.
Newsgroups
FAQs and other resources
FAQ
Simple
Times is a great electronic a-periodical from which
I learn a lot. In particuler, it sponsors the ideal one-page
introduction to
on-line
resources.
My "Network
Device Interrogation" explains SNMP for the working programmer
and administrator.
Darin Davis is working on a
guide
to CMU SNMP.
jump-list
An unofficial
index
to all IETF MIBs
SimpleWeb
SNMP Research International
is a useful commercial site.
David Guerrero's Network
Management & Monitoring with Linux nicely introduces SNMP.
Michael Lucas
introduces SNMP for O'Reillynet.
SMI
Network Management Private Enterprise Codes (prefix:
iso.org.dod.internet.private.enterprise [1.3.6.1.4.1])
The IANA
maintains
a public
repository of
enterprise-specific MIB modules.
The RFCs,
among which my favorites include
- 1157: Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)
- 1215: Convention for defining traps for use with the SNMP
- 1303: A Convention for Describing SNMP-based Agents
Applications
Commercial products
- OpenView-based:
- Solstice (formerly SunNet Manager) (but who cares? this looks
like a ... well, is there a diplomatic way to say that Sun
doesn't seem likely to be successful with this product?)
- NerveCenter
from Seagate (formerly the Netlabs product, DiMONS).
- PATROL
is an open extensible SNMP agent development toolkit.
- Castle Rock
- SNMP Research
Freeware-ish toolkits
- Robert Premuz has released a delightful
Scotty-based
SNMPv2C
agent
which reports on "states of a UNIX system (users,
user groups, processes, memory, and file system)".
- snmpy is written
in Python.
- UCD-SNMP
can ready remote syslogs, report on uptime, disk space, and related
statuses, ...; at least, that's its reputation. I haven't used it
myself.
- SNMPWatcher
and InterMapper are free (for a limited time?) Macintosh SNMP consoles.
- tricklet
is a very simple package which makes SNMP commands available at a
Unix shell prompt.
- "DDRI's
ACE-SNMX
Scripting Executive
is a self-contained SNMP manager,
extensible SNMP agent, scripting language, and development environment
that allows users to rapidly create SNMP applications."
- I like to get SNMP work done with
Scotty, a
Tcl extension.
- tclsnmp2
- MG-WinSNMP
certainly looks interesting.
- Perl has a
SNMPv2
extension, and an even more modern pure-Perl
implementation.
- PHP
has a good SNMP module.
- MibMaster is
"an SNMP to HTML gateway for Linux and Windows/NT", which has
received warm recommendations.
- UT-snmpV2
- 4BSD/ISODE
SNMPv2
- BTNG,
an RMON agent for SunOS, Ultrix, and OS/2
- CMU
SNMP/SNMPv2
- SMIC,
an SNMPv1 MIB compiler
- snacc,
an ASN.1 compiler
- Xnetdb
- See the Simple Times resources
page for much more.
Integrators
Miscellanea
The TechNet CD for NT includes an IP service called snmptrap.exe.
It is not a command line utility.
Software for accessing non-SNMP devices is called a "proxy".
SNMP allows only one agent per network interface. Bummer.
SNMP polling tends to saturate managed networks;
RMON is an
adjunct to SNMP which standardizes a response to this problem.
BER encoding rules define OIDs.
I'm looking at
SNMPY
for new projects.
What is an augmented table?
SMIv2 gives the opportunity
to express that one table shares row creation and
deletion semantics with another, that is, it
augments it. RFC 2578
elaborates this in sections 7.7, 7.8, and 7.8.1.
[Explain displayhints.]
Cameron
Laird's notes on
SNMP/claird@phaseit.net