Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: RE: [Ethereal-dev] Recent Red Had ucd-snmp packages

[Richard Urwin <RUrwin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

There is a README.WIN file in the latest distribution which starts:

LIBSMI NOTES FOR NATIVE WIN32 SUPPORT
=====================================

@(#) $Id: README.win,v 1.6 2001/08/28 09:20:35 strauss Exp $

This directory contains some help to compile the libsmi and associated
tools on a Win32 platform (Windows 95, 98, 2000, NT) with the native
Microsoft Visual C++ compiler. The makefile has been tested with VC++
6.0, but later versions should work very well too.

An alternative GNUmakefile can be used with GNU make program.  You will need
the GNU make "gmake.exe" for w32 platform.


-- 
Richard Urwin, Software Design Engineer
Ricardo Test Automation
Braemar Court, 1311b Melton Road, Syston, UK.
rurwin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 



-----Original Message-----
From: Guy Harris [mailto:gharris@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: 12 December 2001 08:49
To: Nick.Baldwin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: ethereal-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Recent Red Had ucd-snmp packages


On Wed, Dec 12, 2001 at 08:16:50AM -0000, Nick.Baldwin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
wrote:
> 	Ethereal is a selectable package from the install media but
> segfaults on SNMP packets.

I am sorely tempted, at this point, to check in the changes somebody
sent, ages ago, to make Ethereal use libsmi rather than the {UCD,CMU}
SNMP libraries to parse MIB information.

The only reasons I haven't done it are

	1) it took a noticeable time to load the MIB files (I don't know
	   how whether that's just because libsmi comes with more MIB
	   files or if the parser is slower as well)

and

	2) I wasn't sure whether people were as like to have it
	   installed

but it *does* have the advantage that it's *not* a full SNMP library. 
Ethereal isn't an SNMP client or agent, it's just a dissector of SNMP
PDUs, so it doesn't need all the stuff a full SNMP library has, and, not
being a full SNMP library, libsmi doesn't, as far as I know, end up
depending on crypto libraries, or on "fetch statistics from the kernel"
libraries (as UCD SNMP does on Solaris), so the configuration script
stuff may be simpler, as may be the dependencies (RH RPMs of Ethereal
have been having problems for a while; whether this is due to RPMs
including all packages the package in question {transitive closure of
"depends on"}, so that if a package it depends on changes its
dependencies, the original package breaks, or what, I don't know).

It also means we don't have to worry about UCD vs. CMU SNMP.

I don't know whether anybody's gotten it to build with MSVC++, though. 
The page at

	http://www.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de/projects/libsmi/download.html

says "Development takes place on Solaris 2.5.1 and Linux. At least
FreeBSD and W32-cygwin are reported to work also.", but "W32-cygwin
works" isn't the same as "MSVC++ works".

It may also be sufficiently less well-known that people working at Linux
distributors are less likely to "improve" it in an incompatible fashion;
it doesn't have its own formatting routines, so at least nobody can
"improve" it by changing the APIs of the formatting routines in an
incompatible fashion.

The APIs *did* change between the 0.1 and 0.2 versions of the library,
but the guy who sent the changes to make Ethereal use it indicated, as I
remember, that the API probably wouldn't change incompatibly.  (Tcpdump
can optionally be configured to use libsmi, so if they break it, we're
not the only people they'd mess up....)

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