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MIB Views 3.0 Released: New GUI, Platform Changes

MIB Views 3.0 is now available for download.

MIB Views 3.0 is a full rewrite of the GUI from a Tcl/Tk base to a C++ (wxWidgets) base. The new code base should be easier to improve and maintain as the whole application is now C++ (instead of a mix of C++ and Tcl/Tk) and can all be debugged and developed using one set of tools. With the rewrite comes a generally more modern look and feel, as well as several new features that have been on the TODO list quite some time. It does, however, also bring some new platform requirements and dependencies in some cases. Some of these are requirements of wxWidgets, and some are due to retiring old OS versions that are long past their end of life.

Platform Changes:

1. Solaris is now supported on the x86_64 architecture, in addition to prior SPARC support.
2. Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD versions of the application now require GTK2+ to be installed on the system (along with its dependencies).
3. The minimum officially supported FreeBSD version is now 10 (previously 6.2). It may run on older versions, but can no longer be guaranteed. Prior versions were built/tested on a FreeBSD 6.2 host, and 6.2 has been past EOL for a very long time. The old host will be retired shortly and won’t be available for build/testing going forward.
4. The minimum officially supported MacOS X version is now 10.7, and builds will be for Intel architecture only. Apple stopped supporting PPC architecture some time ago, and building MIB Views for both architectures is no longer feasible with support being removed from XCode, etc.
5. The minimum officially supported Linux version has also changed. Prior versions were built on Fedora Core 5 (2.6.x kernel) hosts that are also long past EOL and will be retired shortly. The new versions are built on SuSE 11 (kernel 3.0.x) hosts, though the kernel version itself is not so important as dependencies (on the C/C++ standard library and such).

A list of shared library dependencies for Unix platforms is available here. Primarily, these are new GTK+ library dependencies and updated stdc++ library dependencies due to new GCC versions on Linux and Solaris platforms and FreeBSD’s switch from GCC to Clang.

Major Feature Changes:

• Adding MIBs to the application now installs them in a user’s personal data directory rather than in the application itself. Thus different users can have different MIBs loaded and do not require administrator privileges to add or remove MIBs from the application.
• The Walk View and Table View tools now use Get-Bulk under SNMPv2c and v3 for much faster data retrieval than SNMPv1 with Get-Next only.
• The Query tool now provides more powerful VarBind list management tools. You can add, remove, edit, and re-order VarBinds at will instead of having to clear the list to make changes. Value editors are far more type aware, such as being able to select enumerations by name or build BITS strings by enabling/disabling individual bits by name.
• The Table View tool now has row editing capabilities for tables with writable columns, and row creation capabilities for tables with RowStatus and EntryStatus columns. Using the Query View is no longer necessary for row creation and edit operations.

Windows screen shots are available in the updated online copy of the User’s Guide.