Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Updates to COPS & SNMP dissectors

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From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2003 01:02:20 -0700
On Wed, Jul 23, 2003 at 12:20:42PM +0300, kari.tiirikainen@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> SNMP Dissector as been updated to 
>  - Optionally load all MIBs by exporting environment variable MIBS to
>    value ALL, if it's not already set. By default the option is enabled
>    and it can be changed on the fly.

At least with the MIBs supplied by UCD SNMP 4.2.5, more than one MIB is
supplied that defines the same object, e.g. IF-MIB.txt and
RFC1213-MIB.txt define some of the same objects for network interfaces,
and SNMPv2-MIB.txt and RFC1213-MIB.txt define some of the same system
objects.

For example, the value of sysDescr shows up without quotes when
SNMPv2-MIB.txt is used and with quotes when RFC1213-MIB.txt is used, the
names corresponding to values of ifType are different in IF-MIB.txt and
RFC1213-MIB.txt (e.g., "ethernetCsmacd" vs. "ethernet-csmacd"),
ifPhysAddress displays as colon-separated byte values with IF-MIB.txt
and space-separated byte values with RFC1213-MIB.txt.

Should Ethereal always load MIBs from its installation directory, and
supply its own standard set of MIBs (and allow other MIBs to be added to
Ethereal's installation directory and be loaded)?  That might also avoid
the problems we've seen with some versions of the SNMP library and the
Enterasys MIBs, although it would require the user to install their own
MIBS in the Ethereal installation directory as well as the SNMP
library's directory in order for Ethereal to process them.