Simple as in SNMP | Hacker News Reader

Simple as in SNMP

computer.rip

70 pointszdw38 comments

This reminds me of an article from years ago about SOAP:

The S stands for Simple http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/xml/soap/simple

Are there any sane solutions for managing lots of MIBs? In my experience the largest pain with SNMP comes from the fact that vendors usually provide their MIBs as a single huge pile of junk containing some random version of all the dependencies as well, with completely random file naming conventions.

This means that trying to use two vendors' MIBs together with eg. snmptrapd basically leads to undefined behaviour when translating traps. I don't know if there any way to actually tell which definitions will take precedence or whether the definition is correct.

It also doesn't help that often the trap's translation is just as cryptic as the bare OID.

The state of Cisco's MIB downloads kind of shows the state of things, it's just a very dusty, forgotten corner of their website that links directly to FTP. Part of me doesn't want to complain but browsers don't tend to have native FTP anymore so this becomes a minor pain, and certainly tells you that Cisco has just about forgotten about this.

In general no vendors seem to put much effort into their MIBs and that produces a lot of the frustration around these.

I know that 99.9% of your readers know exactly what SNMP is (even though SMTP is in the title), but when you write a post like this, please just put in what the initialism is actually short for.

In my experience the S in SNMP is anything but simple. Conceptually it is simple, but once you add MIBs in (which describe the data) it gets really complicated.

SNMP support in actual devices seems to be more of a box ticking exercise than anything else now-a-days. It works for the basics but trying to do anything more complicated reveals a lot of bugs in the implementation. I think there is a lot of importing an SNMP library and calling it done SNMP implementations in devices!

Take the Q-BRIDGE-MIB for an example - one I know well. That is a standard implemented by switches so they can configure VLANs for you which sounds great. Does it work? Well sort of - switch manufacturers have invented a lot of ways of getting the implementation wrong so you end up with a translation layer for every switch type.

The security of SNMP is terrible too. In theory SNMPv3 has better security, but very few devices actually implement it, and it is, you guessed it, really really complicated. Only run SNMP on a private (non internet connected) network!

Some vendors can not get even the simple SNMP right and will send OIDs in wrong order in WALK, causing a standard-observing SNMP client to prematurely end a subtree walk or to loop forever.

And the SNMP is mostly read-only, usually only basic functions can be controlled (such as interface enable/disa le) but more complex configuration can be only read (vlans, firewall rules, etc.)

So really the SNMP support in datasheet means nothing.

My favourite is systems that exit a walk early, leaving subtrees you'll never find unless you start the walk specifically within that tree.

Some printers do this and I don't think it's by accident.

In my experience if the designers of a technology felt the need to put the words "simple" or "lightweight" in to the name, it is usually the opposite.

LDAP is lightweight compared to X.500's DAP. SMTP is simple (and lightweight) compared to X.400.

That's true, but then the next generation of technology would have to be named "Simpler". Names work best when they're non-judgmental. Simple, good, fast, etc. are things you want to avoid.

Haha, that's how I always feel. For another example, SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol.

Feels the same way like horrible regimes usually have a lot of positive words in their name.

Although I understand most of them are relatively simple compared to their predecessors rather than being truly simple or minimalistic.

Also because they made it, it may feel "simple" to them and it's "lightweight" because they cut corners...

as someone who has worked with SNMP for the past 5 years and who has written SNMP to websocket bridges and SNMP device simulators, SNMP was simple upto V2C, they made it extremely complex with V3 and they have shoved too many things into what was once a simple protocol. also, SNMP is simple due to the fact that it is built mostly over UDP and that there are no acknowledgements for any action you perform. Netconf is a much nicer interface to work with.

> they made it extremely complex with V3 and they have shoved too many things into what was once a simple protocol.

You're talking about NFS, right?

SNMP: simple network management protocol.

I've never had to work with it and didn't know!

SNMP: Security Not My Problem. That is how I learned it decades ago and it still holds.

Beautiful looking website.

Fun fun fun!

Well-written and informative.

This is about SNMP, and says nothing about SMTP.

Changed above. Thanks!

Except now it says SMNP, not SNMP.

Oosp! Fixed now.

See?! I'm not the only one! :)

I made a stupid typo, once SMTP gets in your brain it's hard to get it to rattle its way back out I guess. It's corrected now but the old link continues to work.

I have the same with use, which apparently I cannot type without the r as in user. And intern, which my brain insists on autocorrecting to internet.

Likewise, I cannot write "director" without extending it by a letter into "directory".

Off topic, but did you get style inspiration from b3ta.com?

https://b3ta.com/newsletter/issue768/

The link does say

>>> 2021-05-01 simple as in smtp

I suspect the idea is that neither smtp nor snmp are simple when you dig down, despite the name.

And I'd agree with the article, mibs can be maddening

And for snmpv3:

"if you are using SNMPv3 where the authentication and configuration can be amazingly, maddeningly complex for some vendors."

Indeed

That could be, but I'd rather they made the case. When SMTP came out, it was indeed very simple. In college in the 1980s, I could send email just by doing something like:

  % telnet mail.umich.edu 25

  MAIL FROM: <william@umich.edu>

  RCPT TO: <joe.blow@umich.edu>

  DATA

  From: William Pietri <william@umich.edu>
  To: My Skeptical Friend <joe.blow@umich.edu>
  Subject: Who needs a mail client?

  You can send email without a mail client!

  .

It's harder now, because spammers. But to me it's amazing that something like has been working for nearly 40 years. For perspective, it came out the same year as the Commodore 64.

The curious can read the inital RFC: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc821

Did author really get the tagline wrong?

Either that, or it's some joke about SMTP and SNMP both having quite a bit of complexity for both being the Simple [Something] Protocol.

The common joke is that "simple network management protocol" is four lies, so I'd assume you're in the right direction.

yup

Reply on news.ycombinator.com