SNMP extensions to Tcl - A Short History

Below is my short history on Tcl extensions to access the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) from within Tcl. It might contain errors and perhaps it does not list your favourite extension because I never heard about it. So please contact me if you know of other implementations or if there are other errors in the following text.


1992

The first snmp extension to Tcl I know of was written by Poul-Henning Kamp (phk@data.fls.dk) based on the CMU snmp stack and tcl-6.4 and is dated around January '92. This code is also included in the CMU snmp sources. Poul-Henning later used a different protocol stack (I think it was the tricklet code) and added MIB access using dbm etc. There was a mailing list which had some discussions about design issues in December '92. The last implementation I know of is available from ftp://nexus.yorku.ca/pub/tcl_snmp/tcl_nm-1.03.tar.Z.

1993

In 1993, Glenn Trewitt and Poul-Henning Kamp wrote some drafts about a Tcl API that should support snmp version 1 and version 2. I have a draft dated July 1993, but I have never seen an implementation. The last message from Poul-Henning Kamp (now phk@freebsd.org) was that he is not working on SNMP anymore.

1994

I took the second snmp_tcl, ported it to the current Tcl version and added it to the scotty Tcl extension in Januar 1994. In September '94, we replaced Poul-Hennings extension with our own Tcl snmp extension, which supports version 1 and version 2.

Also in August '94, Marshall Rose and Keith McCloghrie announced their snmp Tcl API which is documented in their book "How To Manage Your Network Using SNMP". An implementation based on the ISODE snmp stack is available from ftp://ftp.ics.uci.edu/mrose/isode-snmpV2/isode-snmpV2.tar.Z.
Marshall released the manager part of this software including an implementation of the User-based Security Model in July '95. It is available as ftp://ftp.cisco.com/ftp/kzm/snmptcl-1.2.tar.Z.

Another minor Tcl interface is part of the beholder (the RMON implementation written at Delft University of Technology) which just opens a pipe to the stdspook snmp frontend and converts to tcl lists etc. The unix source is available from ftp://dnpap.et.tudelft.nl/pub/btng/btng-5.0.tar.gz.

1995

In March '95, the UT Twente group announced a Tcl interface to their SNMPv2 protocol machine (spm). It is based on the API defined by Marshall Rose and can be found at ftp://ftp.cs.utwente.nl/pub/src/snmp/software/UT-ROSE-1_0.tar.gz.

In June '95, Marshall Rose and Keith McCloghrie announced snmptcl version 1.2 which includes an implementation of a new user-based security model (USEC) developed in cooperation with Glenn Waters and Brian O'Keefe.

In August '95, the USEC was also implemented in scotty-2.0.0 which was released on 11. August 1995.

1996

Marshall Rose released an updated version of snmptcl in January '96. This version includes an implementation of the USEC proposal which has been published as RFC 1909 and RFC 1910.

Scotty version 2.1.0 was released in June '96. It supports SNMPv1, SNMPv2C as well as SNMPv2 USEC.

For nearly every package, there exists a mailing list which is usually mentioned in the README or ANNOUNCE files. Please join them if you have questions to one of the packages listed above.


This page was last updated on 11 June 1996 by schoenw@cs.utwente.nl.