[Xorp-users] How do class SnmpEventLoop export events to the snmp agent

Bruce Simpson bms at incunabulum.net
Sun Jun 7 21:42:11 PDT 2009


A bit more detail as there have been ongoing questions about SNMP on 
this list.

Bruce Simpson wrote:
>
> Last August I did a feasibility study / technical report for XORP, 
> Inc. to look at the problem in detail. I've been of the opinion that 
> AgentX should be used, as it side-steps the need to depend on the 
> loader mechanism.
...
>
>
> These problems are not XORP-specific, or even Net-SNMP-specific, by 
> any means. It's just something which needs to be revisited carefully.

P.S. One of the other things I pointed out in that technical memo, was 
that current commercial SNMP toolkit offerings didn't actually add any 
value for the XORP code base. I looked at Agent++ in particular as it 
seemed the most mature and refined commercial option.

The Net-SNMP developers were very helpful and responsive to technical 
questions, and understood the technical limitations involved in trying 
to propagate large structures across address spaces, having had to 
tackle this engineering problem themselves in commercial deployments.

Using it, of course, requires exposure to the Net-SNMP code base, as 
there is no definitive textbook on how to do it. If there is, I'm all 
ears and would wish someone had pointed me at that book many years ago.

Again, SNMP support is one of many things which were not as mature in 
XORP, during its time as a research project, as we would like.
The important thing to remember is that XORP is an open source software 
project, and outside contributions to fix community issues are very welcome.

cheers,
BMS



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