SNMP-IB

A minimalist non-blocking SNMP V2c and V3 protocol library

About

SNMP-IB is a minimalist non-blocking SNMP version 1, 2c and 3 implementation. It currently only implements a small subset of SNMP, enough to be able to pull information from things.

I started writing this as a way to get to understand SNMP better, I figured it calls its self simple it can't be that hard. To an extent getting version 2c implemented was simple - I had a working implementation after an evenings work. Version 3 took a little longer, mainly getting my head around the bat shit crazy design by committee which is version 3.

I wanted the library to be clean and simple to use. It makes use of Java NIO at the network level and as such is non-blocking, callback based. One instance (and thread) is capable of efficiently communicating with many devices.

What does it support

SNMP-IB currently offers: Get, GetNext, GetBulk and Set requests for both V1, V2c and V3. Only the user security model of V3 is supported. With V3, MD5 and SHA1 are supported for authentication and DES (56bit) and AES (128bit) are supported for privacy.

The code is currently experimental, it only implements the basics that I need at the moment. I'm planning to add more features going forward - trap handling etc - ByteBuffer based ASN.1/BER decoding and encoding (currently BouncyCastle is used for BER handling).

Using SNMP-IB

A key design goal was creating a simple, clean API which is easy to use, the following will fetch the system description and uptime from two devices:

    // Create the transport which will be used to send our SNMP messages
    SNMPTransport transport = SNMPTransport.open();
    
    // A context represents an Agent we are going to contact, or which is going to contact us
    SNMPV2Context lcAgent  = transport.openV2Context("127.0.0.1").setCommunity("public");
    SNMPV2Context swAgent  = transport.openV2Context("172.30.12.1").setCommunity("public");
    
    // Use the context to send messages
    // The callback will be executed when a response to a request is received
    lcAgent.get(new OnResponse.LoggingAdapter(), new OnError.LoggingAdapter(), "1.3.6.1.2.1.1.1.0", "1.3.6.1.2.1.1.3.0");
    swAgent.get(new OnResponse.LoggingAdapter(), new OnError.LoggingAdapter(), "1.3.6.1.2.1.1.1.0", "1.3.6.1.2.1.1.3.0");
    
    // Run our transport to send and receive messages
    transport.run();

The SNMPContext is the key abstraction, to send requests to a device use the methods provided by the SNMPContext instance.

Have a look at the examples package and feel free to have a play around.

Naming

The name amused me, it can mean a number of things: SNMP is bad, SNMP is bolloxed, SNMP implemented badly, etc.

License

SNMP-IB is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

SNMP-IB is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with SNMP-IB. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Author

Chris Ellis

Twitter: @intrbiz

Web: balsa-framework.org or intrbiz.com