Friday, May 11, 2012

SNMP MIB Version Control

I work with Cisco devices a lot, especially in network management. So I naturally have to work with SNMP. Cisco does a pretty good job when it comes to publishing their MIBs. But often I find much inconsistencies in their MIB file distributed from different sources. From minor issues of file-naming differences (you may find the same MIB in files with .mib, .my or .txt extensions), to major changes inside the MIB without a version update. This is probably not a problem that happens in Cisco alone.

It occurred to me that these files are just text, so source code version control tools are perfect for managing them. Digging around a little bit on Google Code and github, I found out some one had already done it.

The SnmpMibs project on github is just what I was thinking about. I hope that the project gets more widely recognized. Especially, I think network device vendors should adopt this model in publishing their MIBs, that would make this whole world a slightly better place.

No comments:

Post a Comment