I know a little about SNMP, but not enough. I need to develop an application that can read standard SNMP MIBs and read/write the various properties. The network end is no problem, but the actual MIBs and exactly what they may contain is something of a black art to me.
I believe I should be able to use LIBSMI to 'parse' the MIBs, but I don't really understand what the output of the 'parser' is going to be, and how best to use it.
All suggestions welcome...
At the risk of throwing you in the deep end, you might want to take a look at net-snmp. The default installation contains a number of standard mibs with their associated implementation. It also contains a utility (mib2c) that will generate boilerplate code from your mib files.
Once you've read your way through a couple of mibs you should have no trouble familiarising yourself with the way that snmp does things.
Most standard MIB documents were defined in corresponding RFCs published at IETF.
Please go to this site to find more details.
Muonics Mib Smithy User Guide provides a good overview of how to build a MIB, which can help you understand the necessary elements for parsing.
You should also look at the ASN.1 ITU specification X.690, because that is the language SNMP is defined in. It also helps if you scour the SNMP RFCs for any Bachus-Naur formatting in the SNMP RFCs. I'm going to suggest you start with RFC3642 and RFC2252.
