Online Help


Getting Started

If you've just installed MIB Master, you're probably keen to get something (anything!) going!

IMPORTANT NOTE

BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING ELSE, CHANGE THE MIB MASTER PASSWORD AS DETAILED IN THE INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS. FAILURE TO DO SO MAY ALLOW SOMEONE TO CHANGE YOUR SITE CONFIGURATION.

Follow these steps to install a minimum configuration which will get you browsing MIBs as soon as possible:

  1. Make sure that the Windows/NT or Linux host on which you wish to run MIB Master has the TCP/IP procotol installed.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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:

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:


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:


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 $