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Santa Cruz, CA. — (MARKET WIRE) — 06/09/2003 — Muonics, vendor of SNMP development tools and libraries, and the creators of Moodss, the popular multi-platform general-purpose monitoring environment, today jointly announced the integration of MIB Smithy SDK into Moodss for SNMP monitoring.

Moodss, or Modular Object Oriented Spreadsheet, is an environment for monitoring operating systems, databases, network devices and servers, or any device or process for which a module is developed. It provides a GUI allowing the construction of graphs, pie charts, tables and other elements to monitor configured targets, issue automated email warnings, run user defined scripts, and a daemon for background monitoring. Data gathered in real-time can be stored in a database for history, trend analysis and reporting.

MIB Smithy SDK is an extension to the Tcl/Tk language providing APIs for development of custom SNMP management/monitoring scripts and custom MIB compiler/converter applications.

“Jean-Luc Fontaine has done an excellent job of integrating the SDK with Moodss as an alternative to the existing module with very few interface differences,” said Michael Kirkham, founder of Muonics. “The new module will provide users with the benefits of SNMPv3 security with very little migration effort, and SDK users may continue to enjoy many unique benefits of using the SDK directly.”

MIB Smithy SDK provides complete read-write access to every detail of SMIv1 and SMIv2 MIB Module definitions, unlike similar extensions providing read-only access to a small subset, so it can be used to convert MIB modules to virtually any desired format such as XML or source code generation. Its management capabilities include support for SNMPv1, SNMPv2c and SNMPv3 with HMAC-SHA-96 and HMAC-MD5-96 authentication and CBC-DES privacy.

“The SDK API is very well written and documented, brings modern SNMP support (such as SNMPv3) to Moodss, as well as compatibility with the latest Tcl/Tk core,” said Jean-Luc Fontaine, author of Moodss. “Muonics’ technical knowledge and support have been very valuable, including helping to improve the existing SNMP module.”

Moodss is available in source and binary forms from http://jfontain.free.fr/moodss/index.html and is included with several Linux distributions. The new module is included as of version 17.3 and requires MIB Smithy SDK version 2.1.

MIB Smithy SDK is available for Windows, FreeBSD, Linux and Solaris platforms. Product and licensing information can be obtained at http://www.muonics.com/ or by email to sales at muonics.com. A 15-day limited evaluation that can be used with Moodss is available at the site.

An updated XML Schema proposal for mapping SMI/MIB modules into XML has been published. The purpose of this proposal is to fix a number of bugs and limitations in the original proposal in an expired internet-draft from June 21, 2000 and to potentially move forward with publishing the document as an Informational RFC if there is sufficient interest (the current proposal has not been published as an internet-draft at this time, but will be if there is sufficient interest). Muonics plans to release support in MIB Smithy shortly for importing and exporting MIB modules from/to XML according to this schema, and input on the proposal is requested. Details of the proposal (its purpose, goals, etc.) and the complete schema can be found at:

http://www.muonics.com/XMLSMI/

We welcome comments from interested parties here, to support at muonics.com, or (most appropriately) the smixml mailing list maintained by folks over at the Technical University of Braunschweig. Information on the mailing list — subscription, archives, etc. — can be also be found at the above URL.

According to Gerard Berthet of mibCentral, the domain registration expired and was quickly snatched up by someone trying to sell the domain back to him. As a result, mibCentral is now operating under a new (domain) name, MIBDepot.com. You can find the site here:

http://www.MIBDepot.com/index.shtml

MIBDepot (formerly mibCentral) is a free service providing a searchable repository of over 5000 SNMP Enterprise-Specific MIBs from many different companies.

CERT recently released security advisory CA-2002-03 regarding multiple SNMP vulnerabilities. If you have SNMP devices running on your network, you may wish to check the following links for more information. You may have devices or computers running SNMP on your network and not be aware.

CERT Advisory CA-2002-03:

• http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2002-03.html

www.incidents.org

• SNMP Self-Test Tool
• Brief SNMP Alert Explanation
• Intructions for Disabling SNMP on certain network devices