Re: Agents and MIB Design

[Frank Strauss <strauss@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de>]

Chris> Is it common/good design to find code managing a MIB Object
Chris> 'table' reference data in another MIB Object 'Table'.  For
Chris> instance, one table contains information about clients that
Chris> have registered with the SNMP Agent and a second table uses the
Chris> first table to determine where on the network to send Traps or
Chris> Unsolicited Responses to.

There are reasonable cases where MIB tables may contain columns that
refer to other tables or table rows. (Although I don't understand
where the second table in your example contains an object that refers
to the first table.)

Chris> Is it good practice to use Octet Strings as indexes for a
Chris> Table?  If so, do most Network Management Applications have the
Chris> ability to take a text stirng input from the user and convert
Chris> the string to dotted ASCII sequence for sending to the Agent.

There are cases where it's meaningful to use strings for table
indexing, especially when tables may get large and it's expected that
managers will have to lookup table entries by a meaningful string
index. Alternatively, if the table is indexed by a simple integer
index, the manager would have to scan a whole column to achieve an
equivalent lookup.

Each SNMP toolkit has to be able to handle strings as table indices.
(Again, I don't understand what you mean by `dotted ASCII sequence'.)

Chris> Have you heard of any implementation where SNMP is used query
Chris> information in the same manner as SQL but using SMI?

Take a look at a rather old paper and implementation that can be
found at http://swallow.doc.ic.ac.uk/Mirrors/ftp.psi.com/psisnmp/snmpql/