building an snmp proxy agent

[Bert Wijnen <[e-mail]>]

Some of your problems we tried to fix by doing an SNMP-DPI
(SNMP Distributed Program Interface), see RFC1228.

In short the idea is this:
 Problems:
   - In many cases (like yours), the agent developer does not have the
     time (or does not want) to learn all the SNMP PDU encoding/decoding
     and/or ASN.1 en/decoding.
   - Only one agent can connect to SNMP port 161.
   - You don't want to go into a running agent and change the source
     of a program that (in many cases) runs with root privileges
 Solution:
   - SNMP-DPI gives you a simple protocol to connect to an existing
     agent and register which variables you want to handle.
   - Agent does all en/decoding for you. You just deliver stuff via
     a couple of simple calls to functions provided with the DPI
     library. These are:
   - Agent multiplexes SNMP packages received/to_be_send via port 161.

SNMP-DPI is included in TCP/IP V2 for VM and MVS (IBM) and TCP/IP for
OS/2 (IBM).
There is also a public domain DPID package, which provides a DPI daemon
on top of a SMUX (RFC1227) capable agent.
It is available for anonymous ftp from
     ftp vm.utcs.utoronto.ca [128.100.100.2]
     cd anonymous.204
     binary
     get dpid.tarbin
     get ping_eng.tarbin
The ping engine is a useful sample of a SNMP-DPI sub-agent.
If you need other samples, feel free to contact me.

Bert Wijnen ([e-mail])