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SNMP: How Does The Agent Do Its Job?


Notes:

IV. SNMP: How Does The Agent Do Its Job?
A. “The Management Information Base (MIB) can be thought of as a database of managed objects that the agent tracks.” – Essential SNMP, section 1.4.
i. There are MIBs for everything. The Net-SNMP package comes with some `standard` MIBs for managing hosts like GNU/Linux boxes. Databases, RAID arrays and other specialized-programs or networkable devices will come with their own MIBs.
ii. MIBs fit into a extensible hierarchy. One of the benefits of this is that a private area has been made for companies. They can make their own MIBs specific to their hardware.
a) For example, the standard MIB for network interfaces just give basic network information. A wireless network device would have additional information associated with it that the standard doesn't cover.
iii. The MIB structures its information like so:
a) Name, called the Object Identifier (OID).
b) Type and syntax. (integer, octet string, counter, sequences, etc.)
This is kind of like defining a variable when writing a C program. One defines those variables to be of type integer, character, etc.
Basic encoding rules. (An ISO standard on how to encode information for transmission.)