[mrtg] Re: MRTG newbie number two :-)

Larry Sheldon lsheldon at creighton.edu
Thu Apr 5 18:17:22 MEST 2001


> Ok... here is a laughable question...
> 
> What is a MIB?
> 
> Serious. I've "played" with MIB images under 3Com Transcend management
> software but those were all image files for our switches/routers. Can I
> pull up these same images under MRTG? Or perhaps I'm just not
> understanding what a MIB is?
> 
> A kind tutorial please :-)
> 
> (I will understand if there is a chuckle here and there)

I hope you will also understand if there is a mild rant or two.....

Last week, I and others discussed this here (in a slightly different context).

"MIB" stands for Managment Information Base" which is the RFC (several of them,
1155 might be one) defined data structure that SNMP (Simple Network Management
Protocol) agents use for recording and exchanging information.

Each MIB (and most agents will deal with several, depending on what they
and where they are) is a complex, convoluted, multi-dimensional nest of
tables, indexed by (or subscripted by, if you are the old COBOL programmer
that it takes to truly appreciate the "beauty" of a MIB) a dotty number
(COBOL would have used commas instead of dots) called and OID (and as in
the previous conversation I don't think I remember what that means--Object
IDentifier?).

It (the whole complex--SNMP-MIBs-OIDs) is a truly fascinating study--spend
some time in the RFCs.
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