Progress update

It has been a quiet summer. I have been spending my time doing other things but now is time to get back to working on the project.

Through the summer I have been playing with a few things and expect to be able to post alpha version of the MIB parser that, in the initial version, will allow you to translate Oid values to and from human readable format. That seams to be a feature people are looking for so I figured why not… As I mentioned, initial version will only support Oid translations but I am already gearing up for full value translation as well. I’m not sure how much value formatting based on MIB definitions would be so this is something that is sitting in reserve.

Anyway, my development version of the MIB parser correctly parses all Cisco MIB files (some 900+ of them) so that should be a good start. I’ll try it against a few other vendor MIB collections before integrating it into SnmpSharpNet and posting it on SourceForge.

I have also spent a little time reading and playing with the SNMP AgentX protocol. From the start of the SNMP#Net project I had no intention of building a library that supports agent operations but focuses on “raw” SNMP functionality and client operations. From the e-mails I’ve been getting, it looks like a lot of people like the agent operations so I figured I’ll see what can be done.

AgentX is a neat compromise where you can use one of the established, rock solid SNMP agents (like net-snmp) that will provide a stable agent platform and then extend its functionality by building an extension agent that communicates with the master (for example, net-snmp) using AgentX.

I have managed to build a couple of test extensions and they work ok for what they are but I am not very happy with the API the way it is now. AgentX specification has some 18 (or so) different packet types for all different operations that are supported and expecting a developer to remember which one to use when and how they are supposed to be sequenced for a correct operation makes the library useless to most people. Once MIB parsing is at a stage where I am at least marginally happy with it, I’ll be spending more time on the AgentX API which will probably be released as a separate library from SNMP#Net to keep things clear.