Agent questions & bugs(?)

Peter J M Polkinghorne (Peter.Polkinghorne@gec-hrc.co.uk)
Mon, 9 Oct 1995 16:28:02 +0100 (BST)

I have been using scotty 2.0.0 and tkined 1.3.3 on SunOS4.1.3 to build a
simple SNMP agent that utilises a MMI RS232 interface for the info.

So far it has been quite successful, but I have come up with a few questions
and possible bugs (I do realise I am not running the latest scotty version
so apologies if fixed already).

a) successive mib load of the same mib, does not overwrite (only of relevance
if developing a mib).

b) snmp# configure does not report that a session is an agent session.

c) snmp# bind event label - by itself does not report bound command.

d) Is there a way to bind multiple agent sessions to one port?
For example I might want the traditional SNMPv1 agent with 2 communities
public and private operating off the same port. I would imagine this need
would be even greater with SNMPv2.

e) It took me a while (I looked at the source) to work out how octet strings
were to be represented - may be a bit of documentation on data representation
would be nice? (I realise there is only so much time for all this & would
prefer code).

f) For an Agent what happens on repeat requests to bindings? ie does get
binding get called more than once if the same request comes in more than once?

g) In my agent because of the underlying RS232 MMI, I use the tk event loop
stuff to process the I/O in a non-blocking timed fashion. However this means
I am vulnerable to another SNMP request occurring in the middle. How have
others dealt with this problem - use "locks" on PDU processing events?

Thanks for any help with problems.

Peter Polkinghorne, Email: pjmp@gec-rl-hrc.co.uk
GEC Hirst Research Centre,
Elstree Way, Borehamwood, "World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Herts. WD6 1RX ENGLAND Incorrigibly plural" - Snow - Louis Macneice.