Additional network protocols...

[1/5] from: fprowse:uu at: 23-Oct-2001 13:22

Guys, I've been following this list for many years now....and have had good success with Rebol. One thing I have missed, that I think many people could benifit from is integrated SNMP protocol access within Rebol. Basic snmp v1/2 would be quite simple to integrate and immediatly useful. Think of the applications you could then develop....:) Has this been considered? Is it on the drawing board? Cheers Francois

[2/5] from: jasonic:nomadics at: 23-Oct-2001 12:06

> One thing I have missed, that I think many people could benifit from is > integrated SNMP protocol access within Rebol. Basic snmp v1/2 would be > quite simple to integrate and immediatly useful. > > Think of the applications you could then develop....:) Has this been > considered? Is it on the drawing board?

My background is mainly visual/multimedia design with an enduring interest in graphic interfaces, smart-maps, shared whiteboards etc.. I have never understood what SNMP is used for. Please can you enlighten me - some example applications/scenarios and elaborate why it would be so useful for REBOL.. Thanks very much - Jason

[3/5] from: fprowse:uu at: 24-Oct-2001 8:23

OK - SNMP (the Simple Network Management Protocol) is a basic protocol consisting of 5 commands that query Agents (or in common terms, Routers, Servers etc) Vendors implementing snmp on their devices are required to comply (as a minium with RFC1157) Vendors are free to extend the capabilities of thier devices through the use of Enterprise extensions (MIB'S) OK....this all sounds rather complicated. But what it allows us to do is query a network device (say a router, or routers) using a simple command - The router will then return the requested output. (Usually an integer value) A basic example of this would be to ask how much traffic is passing through a given interface. If you do this often enough you can manipulate the data through graphs etc....(rebol view anyone?) There are many other examples of this, I could go on for hours! (esp after recently giving a presentation on this topic) I can see real benifit here for Rebol to support current SNMP (and SNMP v3) Any comment from the Rebol people here...? Cheers Francois On Tue, 23 Oct 2001, Jason Cunliffe wrote:

[4/5] from: philip:hayes:btcellnet at: 24-Oct-2001 15:00

Francois, I started writing a snmpv1 MIB II trap script using core. Current hacked version only sends generic traps and doesn't deal with requests. If you've got command then I'd recommend interfacing to the UCD/NetSNmp libraries which provide a common api/lib across Micorsoft and UN*X platforms. Is REBOL really suitable ? Phil.

[5/5] from: holger:rebol at: 24-Oct-2001 7:33

On Wed, Oct 24, 2001 at 08:23:50AM +0000, Francois Prowse wrote:

> I can see real benifit here for Rebol to support current SNMP (and SNMP > v3)

I am not so sure. SNMP is a very specialized protocol, mostly interesting for network admins. Not exactly a mass market :-). Plus there are some SNMP libraries out there that REBOL could probably interface to quite easily. On the technical side the problem is that SNMP, like LDAP, requires ASN.1. We do have an ASN.1 engine in Command, because it is needed for X.509 certificate handling in SSL, but the engine is currently internal only, not accessible from REBOL. To us LDAP is a higher priority than SNMP, because of its wider use. If/when we add LDAP support, SNMP support might be added as well, but no promises yet. In any case it will probably be for Command only, because ASN.1 engines tend to be very large. No time line for any of this yet. The protocols are on our list, but other things take precedence for now. -- Holger Kruse [holger--rebol--com]