Online Help
Getting Started
If you've just installed MIB Master, you're probably keen to
get something (anything!) going!
Follow these steps to install a minimum configuration which will get
you browsing MIBs as soon as possible:
- Make sure that the Windows/NT or Linux host on which you wish to run
MIB Master has the TCP/IP procotol installed.
- Make sure that the client machines which will be using MIB Master
to access the Internet have the TCP/IP protocol and a Web browser installed.
- Make sure that the directory into which MIB Master was installed
has a subdirectory called mibs and within that there is a subdirectory
mib2 which contains the standard MIB II templates.
- Make sure that all HTML files have the extension .html and they
have not been truncated to .htm by the archive extraction tool being
used to install MIB Master.
- Make sure the host name and community name are correct in the MIB
Master Welcome Page and you can now view your MIBs!
Traps
The Trap List page is divided into two panes. The top pane displays
a list of all traps which have been received by MIB Master. The bottom
pane will display information on a particular trap when it is selected
from the trap list.
Top pane
The top pane on the Trap List page displays a list of all received traps.
The list may be scrolled up and down if required. This list will refresh
automatically as required to display new trap information.
For each received trap, the following information is displayed in the
top pane:
- ID: This is a number allocated by MIB Master to identify each trap
- Type: This will be one of
- Cold Start
- Warm Start
- Link Up
- Link Down
- Auth Fail
- EGP Loss
- Enterprise
- Time: the time at which the trap was received
- Host: the name (or IP number) of the host which sent the trap. This
name will also be a hyperlink to the View MIBs page for that host
- Info: This is a hyperlink which will display additional trap information
in the lower pane
- Clear: This hyperlink will remove the trap from the trap list
Bottom pane
When the Info hyperlink for any trap is selected, the bottom pane will
display the full trap information. The following information is displayed:
- Time : the time at which the trap was received
- Host: the name (or IP number) of the host which sent the trap. This
name will also be a hyperlink to the View MIBs page for that host
- Version: the value of the Version field in the received trap
- Community: the value of the community field in the received trap
- Enterprise: the value of the enterprise field in the trap
- TimeTicks : value of the TimeTicks field in the received trap
- Generic Type: the trap type
- Specific type: the value of the specific type field in the received
trap
- Variable bindings: the variable bindings in the trap (if any)
Discover Hosts
The Discover Hosts page allows you automatically find hosts and to determine
which of them are capable of responding to SNMP requests. It does this
by first sending a "ping" command (to be accurate, an ICMP Echo
Request packet) to an IP address suspected of containing a host. If a reply
is received, it will then attempt to retreive an element from the System
MIB of that host using SNMP. Based upon the result of these tests, it will
display a list of hostnames and their status. This list will contain hyperlinks
to the View MIB page for that host.
The following parameters are required by the Discover Hosts page:
- First IP address: the IP address (or hostname) to start searching from
- Number of addresses to try: maximum number of hosts to interrogate
- Ping timeout: the maximum time to wait for a ping reply
- Ping retry: maximum number of times to retry the ping request
- SNMP timeout: maximum time to wait for a reply to the SNMP request
- SNMP retries: maximum number of times to retry the SNMP request
- SNMP community: community name to use when requesting the SNMP info
HTML Template Files
To translate SNMP objects into something that a Web browser can display,
Template Files are used. These are HTML (HyperText Markup Language) files
that contain special macro codes that are substituted with dynamic data
from the SNMP agent. Each macro is contained within the standar HTML comment
element surrounded by <!-- and --> sequences.
There are also some parameters passed to the template file translator
via arguments on the URL. These appear after a '?' character and are of
the form name=value separated by '&' characters. These are
typically used to pass the host name and community name to the translator,
eg. the URL for accessing the MIB view page the following would be used:
http://localhost:1090/mibs.html?host=localhost&community=public
The names and values used here are automatically defined as variables
for access by macros in the HTML file when it is translated for tranmission
to the remote Web browser.
The general format for a macro contained in the HTML file is:
<!--#snmp name args -->
where name is the name of a command or an identifier name and
args are optional space separated arguments to the command.
Commands
The commands available are:
get oid ...
Get the value of an object. This will set a number of predefined variables
with values that can be used in other macro substitutions. The args
are a sequence of variables and ASN literal components that are concatenated
to produce the final object identifier to retrieve from the SNMP agent.
set name args ...
Set the value of an identifier name to the concatenation of
the remaining arguments.
table htmlfile oid ...
Create a HTML TABLE of hot links to a sub-section of SNMP objects.
The first parameter is the HTML template file to load for the hot link.
The remaining parameters are concatenated together to create the object
identifier used as the first entry in the table. The HTML template page
will have a variable passed to it via the URL indicating the "index"
into the array. This "index" is always the last set of numbers
in the OID.
ltable htmlfile label oid ...
Create a HTML TABLE as in the table command above, but will
attempt to get the name to use in the hot link from an OID. The OID to
get the name from is built by using the oid part specified at the
end of the argument list, plus the label argument and the finally
the "index" part for each table entry.
enum num identifier num identifier ...
Displays as an enumerated type the integer value of the object that
was retrieved with the previous get command. The actual string displayed
is the identifier that matches num with the object value.
bitarray identifier identifier ...
Displays as a bit array the integer value of the object that was retrieved
with the previous get command. The list of identifier strings correspond
to bit 0, bit 1, bit 2 etc.
array identifier identifier ...
Displays as an enumerated type the integer value of the object that
was retrieved with the previous get command. This is similar to the enum
command but assumes the values 0, 1 2 etc.
variable
Displays the value of the variable. This is a usually a straight macro
substitution of the variable name.
Predefined variables
These are the predefined variables, some are available only after a
set command has been executed.
host
Host name for the SNMP get. This is usually set via the URL.
community
Community name for the SNMP get. This is usually set via the URL.
host_community
Host and community name in the form used in a URL (host=xxx&community=yyyy)
date
Displays the current time and date in RFC1123 format.
oid
Object identifier for use in the SNMP get command. This is usually
set via the set command in the HTML for use by later commands.
id
The numeric identifier for the object that was retrieved with the previous
get command.
type
Text description for the type of the object that was retrieved with
the previous get command.
typecode
Numeric code for the type of the object that was retrieved with the
previous get command.
value
Value of the object that was retrieved with the previous get command.
hex
Value, as a hexadecimal integer, of the object that was retrieved with
the previous get command.
smartvalue
Value of the object that was retrieved with the previous get command.
This will translate using the default format given the type of the object.
dateandtime
Value, as a date and time, of the object that was retrieved with the previous get command.
vendor
Assuming that the object that was retrieved with the previous get commands,
is an OID in the Enterprise MIB, extract the enterprise number and use it to
lookup the name of vendor in the vendor database.
Examples
Here are some examples of some macro and their substitutions:
<!--#snmp date--> Sun, 14 Apr 1996 14:54:28 +1000
<!--#snmp community--> public
<!--#snmp set oid 1.3.6.1.2.1.1--> translates to empty string
<!--#snmp get oid 3.0--> translates to empty string
<!--#snmp id--> 1.3.6.1.2.1.1.3.0
<!--#snmp type--> TimeTicks
<!--#snmp smartvalue--> 23 hours, 18 mins, 11.36 secs
<!--#snmp get oid 7.0--> translates to empty string
<!--#snmp hex--> 4F
<!--#snmp bitarray physical datalink internet end-to-end layer5 layer6 applications-->
79 = physical, datalink, internet, end-to-end, applications
$Revision: 1.6 $ $Date: 1996/04/17 11:13:41
$