🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <469@secola.Columbia.NCR.COM> clefor@secola.UUCP () writes:
>I have some questions about some SNMP standards and would appreciate any
>feedback from "those in the know."

You really ought to be posting this to snmp@nisc.nyser.net.

>My question is: 	What is the standard format for this octet string?
>                	6 byte phys addr:	080014118562
>            OR, 	character string:	"08:00:14:11:85:62"

The former -- the value is the binary value of the address.  When we
did the SMI we could have defined a special type, but that would have
left an unending need to allocate types for all the different forms of
addresses on all kinds of media.  (In practice, the it really may not
be that much of a problem as lots of things use 48-bit addresses.)

>With the particular SNMP agent I'm using, ifPhysAddress came back in the 
>"08:00..." form, and atPhysAddress came back in the 6 byte form.

Somebody is doing it wrong.  However, you may want to look deeper as
some manager/client-side programs either know that these items are
special and know how to pretty-print them, or delve into the values to
find the most human oriented way to print them.  You might find that
the value is being returned over-the-wire in the "correct" format but
is being pretty-printed for you.

>(This is probably more for a Nysernet dude but here goes..)
>WHY are the components of the mib path defined as unsigned longs?  Isn't that
>a lot of space for a number which is usually a one digit number?

I'm not a PSI (ne Nysernet) dude, but anyway...
Some early SNMP implementations got into trouble by assuming that
object identifier components are a single digit.  Right off the bat
you run into TCP and UDP port numbers as components, and these must be
at least 16 bits (which can map into as many as three bytes in the
ASN.1 encoded object identifier.)  I'm starting to run into equipment
where the number of instances is often in the thousands and a single
byte just doesn't make it.

I sure hope I'm being lucid -- I don't know what spirit is moving me
to read mail at 4am.

				--karl--
				Karl Auerbach
				Epilogue Technology Corp.
				Santa Cruz, California