Building a Rudimentary Management System

An NMS consists of a minimum of the following items:

• SNMP manager

• MIBs

• Database

• SNMP agents

We now focus on building the bare essentials of the first component only, the SNMP manager. This manager can target specific SNMP agents on any IP-reachable (and SNMP- reachable ) machine for which the appropriate community rights exist. MIB objects are accessible to the manager by specifying an OID on the program command line. The program we construct in this section can be seen as the first step to producing a more complete NMS. For this reason, we don't provide a database facility but instead use the program command line as our data source. Similarly, the data sink is just the console output rather than a GUI or database. The examples use the standard SNMP services provided with the Windows NT/2000 platforms.