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MIB Smithy 3.0 and SDK 3.0 Release

MIB Smithy 3.0 is a new major release containing a number of important new features, including support for designing, editing and validating PIB (Policy Information Base) modules for the COPS (Common Open Policy Service) protocol. Also included are new output and preview formats and GUI improvements for speed in various tables, lists and trees as well as sorting. Usability improvements various SNMP tools have also been made, and a new “mibinfo” command line tool for querying properties of MIB/PIB modules was added.

Significant Changes (MIB Smithy)

• PIB Modules have been added as a recognized file type in open/save dialogs (with extension .pib) so that they can be filtered upon and RFC text extraction skipped.
• Starting with the SNMP tools, the Find dialog and some properties, various table and multi-column list GUI elements have been switched over to a new control that should be faster and provide more capabilities in the future.
• Table Viewer, Trap Watch and SNMP Walk tools now convert enumeration values to “name(value)” format for display.
• Trap Watch tool will now decode and display index values from instance identifiers in the variable bindings so that all varbind data should be visible.
• The AUGMENTS property of the OBJECT-TYPE workspace has been moved from the General page to the Index page, along with the addition of fields for PIB-INDEX, PIB-TAG and EXTENDS.
• Converted the GUI trees of the Project and Files tab and the MIB Browser tool to a new, faster control.
• The “Add Files” (to project) dialog now allows multiple file selection, so several files can be added at once rather than requiring them to be added individually.
• The “Sequence Structure” property now has an “Auto” button which can be used to automatically update the column object/type information in the sequence type assignment associated with a table definition, provided naming conventions are followed.
• The Tcl/Tk version used has been updated to 8.4.6, and other controls such as the combobox have also been updated with new fixes and enhancements.
• A number of GUI code optimizations have been made along with improved usability in several list-oriented properties.
• “Delete” buttons in the Enumerations and Revisions list properties have been renamed to “Remove” for consistency with others.
• New output formats “OID Tree” and “ID List” have been added to the Preview options and a new File -> Export menu.
• Tables created with the Table Wizard that have a RowStatus objects now have their non-index columns defaulted to read-create access.
• Updated XML Schema (now version 2.1) and import/export capabilities to support COPS-PR-SPPI (PIB) modules and hex/binary format attributes for range, size and enumeration values
• Added a New Module wizard to automate building the recommended (partly by the IETF MIB Review Guidelines) top-level module structure.
• Added hooks into the User’s Guide from the Help menu and via the F1 key for context-sensitive help. In lieu of a built-in HTML rendering engine, this currently requires a web browser to be found in the path, or Windows registry.
• A new “mibinfo” command line tool can be used to query properties of records. For example: “mibinfo -M /path/to/mibs fulloid sysDescr” to get the fully qualified OID for sysDescr. The property names and results are the same as those used by the SDK’s “smilib get” command, with or without a hyphen as the first character.

Miscellaneous Bug Fixes (MIB Smithy)

• SNMP tools will no longer pause loading of modules at startup when launched in the middle of the loading (although the initial settings dialog still will, until it is closed).
• Merged variation and XML output bug fixes from version 2.4.9 and 2.4.10.

Significant Changes (MIB Smithy SDK)

• Support for importing, validating and querying COPS-PR-SPPI PIB (Policy Information Base) modules has been added, along with dozens of new PIB-specific checks in addition to those shared with MIB modules.
• Added “-categories” option to the SMI database’s get/set commands for MODULE-IDENTITY statements to get/set the SUBJECT-CATEGORIES field in COPS-PR-SPPI MODULE-IDENTITY statements.
• Added “-extends”, “-pibtag”, “-pibreferences”, “-pibindex”, “-piberrors” and “-uniqueness” options to the SMI database’s get/set commands for OBJECT-TYPE statements to get/set the EXTENDS, PIB-TAG, PIB-REFERENCES, PIB-INDEX, PIB-ERRORS and UNIQUENESS fields, respectively, in COPS-PR-SPPI OBJECT-TYPE definitions.
• The warning regarding forbidden zero-valued enumerations in SMIv1 has been clarified for other versions to note it as a compatibility issue where it otherwise might’ve implied the module was already being treated as SMIv1.
• The “rfc2mib” tool now recognizes the “PIB-DEFINITIONS” keyword in COPS-PR-SPPI PIB (Policy Information Base) modules, allowing them to be extracted from RFC text files as with MIB modules.
• Warnings regarding the import of symbols from different versions of the SMI base modules have been made more specific. Thy now distinguish between importing macros and base types from mixed versions (which is generally not allowed) and other records such as OID and type assignments (which at least COPS-PR-SPPI modules may do).
• Updated bundled IETF and IANA MIB modules to the latest as of March 26, added IETF PIB modules to new ‘pibs’ directory.
• Added RFC 3159 (COPS-PR-SPPI) to the docs directory for reference.
• Added ability to parse past illegal usage of identifiers starting with uppercase letters for enumeration/bit labels. The error is now postponed until the validation stage.
• Improved DEFVAL validation, particularly with regards to use of hex/binary values and with BITS syntax.
• Hex/binary values are now properly supported and validated in size/range specifications, where previously errors would be generated during validation. They are also now supported in enumeration/bit values with compatibility warnings.
• Hex and binary values are now distinguished internally from character strings so that, for example, “‘FF’H” is treated preserved as a character string while ‘FF’H is preserved as a hex string. This includes the -defval property, which adds “hstring”, “bstring” and “cstring” as formatting qualifiers. POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY
• The decl-suffix query APIs (-enumdecl, etc.) return hex/binary values as declared in the MIB file. The non-suffixed versions (-enums, etc) will convert such values to integers as appropriate.
• Errors and warnings regarding the length of hex/binary values and use of lowercase versus uppercase have been moved from the parsing stage to the validation stage. They are no longer automatically made uppercase, at least for now, as it will generally only affect plain ASN.1 parsers and not MIB/PIB parsers.
• The SMI database’s “get” command now takes an optional “-exact” argument which, is specified, requires that the record search string be an exact match (i.e., no extra subidentifiers).
• The SMI database’s “get” command can now be given multiple property arguments as opposed to just one. If a single property is specified the result is the same. If multiple properties are specified then the result is a list with each element corresponding to the result for that particular property.
• A new optional package is available providing interfaces emulating most of those provided by the “mib” and “snmp” (manager) interfaces of Scotty/TNM. The intent of this package is to aid migration from Scotty/TNM by allowing the SDK to be a drop-in replacement for most applications. See “Scotty/TNM Compatibility Package” in the installation section for more details.
• Added -logchannel SNMP session configuration option that can be used to specify channels to send hex dumps of sent and received packets. Given one channel name, it will send both to that channel, or it can take a list specifying one channel for sent and one channel for received packets. Specifying an empty string disables logging.

Miscellaneous Bug Fixes (MIB Smithy SDK)

• “Imported but never used” warnings were occasionally suppressed for some macros due to inadvertently incrementing use counters while determining the SMI version.
• Two warnings were issued for row OBJECT-TYPEs missing both INDEX and AUGMENTS clauses, rather than one.
• Corrected false error that indicated “UInteger32” was not to be imported.