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MIB Smithy 4.1.2, MIB Smithy SDK 3.4.6, and MIB Views 1.4.2 are now available for download, with essentially the same bug fixes in each. These will most likely be the last releases based on the SDK 3.4 development branch, as we’re finally getting close to having the SDK 4.0 development branch in a releasable state. Since it’s taken an unusually long time to release 4.0 branch and there are some potential compatibility issues you’ll need to be aware of, as well as new features affecting all three of these products, I’ll talk a bit more about it in a post to follow shortly.

Changes affecting MIB Smithy, MIB Smithy SDK, and MIB Views:

305: Host ID not matched when interface is disconnected

Windows interfaces that were disconnected were not recognized by the license manager, requiring laptop users to have to swap license keys depending on whether they were on wired or wireless. This is is no longer necessary, as the interfaces are seen whether connected or not.

727: Clarify “trailing hyphens will be stripped” error

The parser message produced for identifiers with illegal trailing hyphens was stripping the hyphen in the error message (indicating the corrected identifier was invalid) yet not automatically correcting the error as it should.

1368: Windows: IPv6-only interface Host IDs not available

Windows interfaces configured to support only IPv6 could not previously be used for licenses keys, but can now.

1406: Circular type references cause crash

A type definition derived from another type definition, which is derived from the first type definition, would lead to a crash due to infinite recursion. (Note: TEXTUAL- CONVENTIONs cannot legally derive from other TEXTUAL-CONVENTIONs.)

Additional changes affecting MIB Smithy SDK:

312: Changing IPs with SNMPv3 loses auth/priv state

Changing the target IP address of an existing SNMPv3 auth/priv session without also setting the auth/priv password did not sufficiently prepare the session to localize keys with the next request, causing the session to switch to no-auth/no-priv.

1354: Timeout of Tnm-style async requests causes error with future request

Upon timeout of a Tnm-style async request, the callback was being invoked using non- Tnm style arguments, which would typically cause an error, when it should not be invoked at all.

MIB Smithy 4.1.1 and MIB Smithy SDK 3.4.5 are now available. The majority of these changes parallel those of MIB Views 1.4.1, plus a number of bug fixes for the XML-SMI parser uncovered while putting together a full regression test suite for it.

Changes affecting MIB Smithy

482: Updated Tcl/Tk version

The Tcl/Tk base for MIB Views was upgraded to 8.4.19. Among other things, this fixes a crash at startup on later versions of Mac OS X.

606: Application icons for Unix

Full-color application icons have been added to Unix platforms, replacing the old monochrome bitmaps.

1272: TreeView: lexicographic errors can cause loop

In certain circumstances, an agent returning lexicographically incorrect responses to get-next requests could cause branch expansion to loop until a user requested stop, and duplicate branches could be displayed. More protections against lexicographic errors were added to prevent this.

Changes affecting MIB Smithy and MIB Smithy SDK

1130: XMLSMI: some binary strings not formatted correctly

In some cases, using the ‘bstring’ integer format attribute would result in the binary value not being quoted/suffixed properly (e.g. ‘B’00001011 instead of ‘00001011’B).

1133: XMLSMI: capability variation parse error

A “variation element unexpected or unrecognized” error would occur due to attempting to parse the wrong element when parsing AGENT-CAPABILITIES variations.

1159: XMLSMI: piberrors should be parsed as enum list

The piberrors element was being parsed as a value reference, rather than an enumeration list. This was fixed previously for the SMI parser and in the schema and database APIs, but not in the XML parser.

1124: XMLSMI: oid child element doesn’t work in some places

Using the oid element to define a defval or index with an OID value rather than an identifier or with importsfrom to disambiguate imported modules resulted in a parse error.

1137: XMLSMI: wrong size/range using min or max attribute only

When using the size or range element with only the min or max attribute, the other was defaulting to 0 rather than defaulting to the same value.

1138: XMLSMI: syntax tag element’s ‘implicit’ attribute not preserved

The implicit attribute of the syntax tag element was not being checked or preserved by the XML parser. This would generally only affect SMI base modules represented as XML, not MIB/PIB modules.

1146: XMLSMI: text wrapping issues on load

Newlines were being collapsed in places they shouldn’t when parsing MixedText fields like description, resulting in (for example) <pre> not being preformatted.

I am pleased to announce the release of MIB Smithy SDK 3.4.4. Many bug fixes have been made in this release to clear the way for new features.

Changes in this release:

741: Allow empty modules in SMI parser

Modules without any assignments in them (which might happen if you create a module in MIB Smithy and save it before defining anything in it) can now be loaded by the SMI parser.

253: Documentation for database -logcommand setting

Documentation has been added for the SMI Database’s -logcommand setting, which allows user control over the formatting of compiler and parser messages.

851: XML version of SNMPv2-SMI errors about IMPORTS

Validating SNMPv2-SMI from XML format caused a false error regarding OBJECT-IDENTITY needing to be imported due to module version not being determined when there is no imports element.

848: Tables are not saved/restored from XML correctly

Single-identifier subtypes (as in the ‘SysORTable’ in ‘SEQUENCE OF SysORTable’) were being assigned by the XML parser to the wrong field, resulting in saved/restored XML files from failing validation on tables.

842: Importing of XML files fails with no error message

The XML parser did not previously support sending log messages through the SMI database’s logcommand, just logchannel. This resulted in error messages not being displayed in the “Tasks” list of MIB Smithy.

844: XML files fail to import with large integers

Due to an arithmetic error in the XML parser’s integer overflow checking, XML files could fail to import with sufficiently large integer values (e.g. in range elements).

914: Dropped notifications during bursts

Notifications could be dropped during bursts of many (or large) packets due to the default receive buffer size provided by the Windows TCP/IP stack. The SDK now requests up to a 1 MB buffer for the trap socket (on all platforms) to reduce the risk of packet loss.

255: MacOSX: tclsh aborts loading SDK without valid license key

With Tk built for Aqua, tclsh would terminate with SIGABRT when not logged in at the console when attempting to display the license dialog. The SDK now checks if Aqua or X11 environments are available to the session before attempting to load Tk.

882: Relaxed case restrictions on database queries

Although the SMI parser was able to handle illegal upper/lowercase first letters for record names, the validation for database queries was still strict. This caused “$db get -fulloid Foo” to succeed but “$db get -fulloid Foo.0” to error regarding an invalid OID (which it is, but limited the usefulness of the parser’s handling of them).

912: SNMPv1 Trap-PDU encoding incorrect

The SNMPv1 Trap-PDU fields were being encoded in the wrong order when using the SDK to send SNMPv1 traps. Consequently, the SDK could not decode SNMPv1 traps sent to itself.

850: XML parser doesn’t check for equal min/max range values

Both the min and max attributes of the range element in the XML Schema are required, so single range values are generated as equal min and max. However, upon importing an XML file these values were not merged back into one, resulting in validation errors.

818: TRAP-TYPE’s REFERENCE field not preserved

The REFERENCE field of TRAP-TYPEs will no longer be lost when loading MIB modules.

817: Querying CREATION-REQUIRES returns only one element

Querying CREATION-REQUIRES property of a variation will now return all of the symbols listed, rather than only one.

254: snmplib format command documentation corrections

Docs for the snmplib format command were corrected to reflect the actual default format for enumerations (label only) and invalid “-format” argument in example 2.

308: -includes option missing from get capabilities

The documented -includes property for querying AGENT-CAPABILITIES statements was implemented only with the -mandatory-groups synonym, while both -includes and -mandatory-groups were supported for querying conformance modules and only -mandatory-groups was supported for querying MODULE-COMPLIANCE. Both ACs and MCs now support both synonyms.

Changes affecting MIB Smithy:

• A “wrong # args” error could occur when previewing a single OBJECT-TYPE in SMI format (the error did not occur when previewing the whole module).

Changes affecting both MIB Smithy and MIB Smithy SDK:

• The “piberrors” type in the XML-SMI Schema document was not correct and did not match the implementation and has been corrected.
• Newlines and carriage returns in OCTET STRING values were forcing conversion to hex (such as in varbind values in responses) as if they were on-printable characters.
• A crash could occur if the environment variable for pointing to the license key file were mistakenly set to a directory instead.

A crash could occur when using the $session walk command synchronously (no callback) and the request timed out. This problem is fixed in the MIB Smithy 4.0.3 and MIB Smithy SDK 3.4.2 releases.