README.develop

The Mini SNMP daemon does not support passing through SNMP requests to other
processes or loading plugins. Thus, if you want to extend mini_snmpd by your
own MIB variables, you need to do the following:



1.)  Obtain a vendor OID

The default vendor OID is only a placeholder where you need to insert the PEN
(private enterprise number) of your organization. If you do not have one, you
can get one assigned by the IANA (internet assigned numbers authority) free of
charge. See their PEN application webpage at http://pen.iana.org/.

The vendor is set in the Makefile (the "VENDOR=" make variable).



2.) Write the MIB file

This is not needed for mini_snmpd, but you should be prepared to deliver the
MIB description in text form to your users for convenience. Examples of MIBs
can be found in the net-snmp package.



3.) Add a define and the code for your extension

You should make your extension a compile-time option and put all specific code
in #ifdef/#endif blocks to make it easier to distinguish between built-in and
added code.

The "demo" extension example, which provides two random integers, shows how to
do this (CONFIG_ENABLE_DEMO in the sources). Note that it uses the PEN 99999,
which is not yet assigned by the IANA, but since there is no warranty that this
doesn't happen, do not enable the demo extension in a release version!



4.) Things to consider

The MIB table has a fixed maximum length (set by the MAX_NR_VALUES define). If
you get a runtime error about a table overflow when creating the MIB entry, you
need to increase that value.

The mib_update() function is called on every received request, to give the
handlers the possibility to decide whether to update their corresponding MIB
variables everytime (for example the system uptime) or only in the interval
specified by the -t commandline parameter (for example the disk info). To save
CPU cycles, time-consuming updates or updates of values that change only slowly
should made dependent on the timeout counter.

For variables of type "octet string", you need to call mib_build_entry() with
a string with the maximum length that your variable can have during runtime.
This is needed by mib_build_entry() to determine the size of the data buffer
for that MIB entry.

If the function you use to determine the new MIB values is operating system
dependent, you should add your code to both linux.c and/or freebsd.c instead
of utils.c (which should only be used for os-independent functions).

For debugging output, use the lprintf() macro instead of hardcoding printf() or
syslog() calls.



Robert Ernst <robert.ernst@aon.at>