SNMP Foundations and Concepts
Simple Network Management Using Net-SNMP and ftlSNMP
8-11
•
snmptranslate
—This command converts object ID values into more easily
understood forms. See
snmptranslate
(1).
•
snmptable
—This command repeatedly uses SNMP
GETNEXT
or
GETBULK
requests to get information on a network entity, which is specified as, and must be
mapped by, a table. See
snmptable
(1).
•
snmpset
—This command uses the SNMP
SET
request to control, or set
information on, a network entity. See
snmpset
(1).
•
snmptrap
—This command uses the SNMP
TRAP
operation to send information
to a network manager when a trigger condition is met. See
snmptrap
(8).
•
snmpinform
—This command essentially works like
snmptrap
, but uses a
different form of signal, and can require a response in order to suppress resending.
See
snmptrap
(1).
•
snmptest
—This command is a flexible test utility that can send a variety of signals
and retrieve a variety of information. It is best used within shell scripts that can hide
its complexity and focus on particular test queries. See
snmptest
(1).
•
snmpnetstat
—This command is a powerful data retrieval tool to query a remote
system and retrieve a variety of information about communications objects. See
snmpnetstat
(1).
•
snmpdelta
—This command is a tool used to monitor values of a network object
over time, and respond if the values deviate from established parameters. See
snmpdelta
(1).
MIBs
A
management information base
(MIB) uses ISO Abstract Syntax Notation 1 to assign
a unique object identifier to any object to be managed by SNMP. This syntax is a
hierarchical model that is intended to provide unique object identification. Under this
notation, there is conceptually only one true MIB; everything fits within it. To the extent
that developers observe syntactic standards, various MIB definitions will not conflict,
because any MIB used should use only unique identifiers. Thus Net-SNMP and other
SNMP implementations allow a large number of MIBs to be loaded from various paths
at initialization, under the presumption that all identifications are unique. In current
standard SNMP implementations, at least the IETF MIB-II definitions supporting
RFC1213 must be used. RFC1213,
Management Information Base for Network
Management of TCP/IP-based internets: MIB-II
can be downloaded from the IETF Web
site.
SNMPv1 MIBs supported only strings of data, but later MIBs typically use a columnar
layout of information that can be easily manipulated by a scripting language that
handles textual data, such as Perl. The supplied MIBs are stored in the
/opt/ft/mibs
and
/usr/share/snmp/mibs
directories in the default search path.
