Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] Support of SNMP MIB on Windows XP

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From: "Martin Regner" <martin.regner@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 22 Feb 2004 19:59:48 +0100
Ole Krog Thomsen wrote:
<I have installed ethereal 0.9.9 and later 0.10.1 on my MS Windows XP.
<
<I cannot get the 0.10.1 to show symbolic values af SNMP OIDs. When I go
into
<the preferences -> protocol -> SNMP omn the 0.10.1 I get a list of the
<relevant MIBs, but none of them seems to work, while on the 0.9.9 I cannot
<find anywhere a reference to the supported MIBs, maybe except in the .index
<file in the ...\Ehtereal\snmp\mibs directory.

I'm not 100% sure that my description below is 100% correct, since I have
just quickly browsed through the code (packet-snmp)
and haven't experimented so much with SNMP during the last months.

The parameter "Edit/Preferences.../Protocol/SNMP/Mib modules to load" tells
NETSNMP what MIBs should be read
(by setting the MIBS environment variable).
You can specify exactly what MIBs to load, or set the parameter to ALL and
all MIBs in the mibs directory will be read.
I have set it to ALL.

With earlier Ethereal versions on Windows you had to set the MIBS
environment variable either to ALL
or to the MIBs you wanted to load.
Now certain MIBs will be used by default when the MIBS environment variable
is not set:
IP-MIB:IF-MIB:TCP-MIB:UDP-MIB:SNMPv2-MIB:RFC1213-MIB:UCD-SNMP-MIB

The directory \snmp\mib directory where Ethereal is installed will now be
used as mib directory (if MIBDIRS environment variable is already set it
will be
used instead).
With earlier versions (0.9.x) the MIBDIRS environment variable was used it
was defined, and there was a preference setting to specify
a directory that was used if the MIBDIRS environment varaible wasn't set
(one problem with that approach was that the preference setting
maybe pointed to an old directory where you had installed Ethereal a while
ago since the preference value was kept if you didn't change it manually)

<As I am fairly interested in using the program to get symbolic dump of SNMP
<exchanges, I would appreciate an explanation of this, furhermore I would
<also like to know if it is possible to add additional mib-files (vendor
<specific).

Yes, it should work to load additional MIBs. I just tried it with 0.10.1
version on Windows XP.
You put them in the \snmp\mibs subdirectory where Ethereal has been
installed and set the "Mib modules to load"
perference setting to ALL or add the MIB(s) you want to load.

There has been some problems that Etheral has been hangning at startup if
there are malformed MIBs that are to be loaded.
Maybe that problem still exists (the problem was/is in NETSNMP).
I think that that problem was one reason why the "mib modules to load"
preference setting was added.