At the start of my work term in May 2010, improving the snmp-adaptor in the AS was given as one of the projects I could work on. I believe the request for improvement came from Dimitris. The improvement was to:

• Change from depending on joesnmp to snmp4j as the SNMP implementation
• Support not only v1 of the SNMP spec, but support v2c and v3, as well as the additional operations that came with them.

Improvements include:

• USM based security is supported, through the addition of a new users.xml.
• The GETBULK operation has been implemented.
• Tabular objects and wildcard matching in attributes.xml has been implemented.
• The ability to generate an MIB out of the attributes.xml and notifications.xml used by the snmp-adaptor. This allows users to quickly use the adaptor with existing managers.
• Values that are of complex types can now be monitored as an SNMP table (Arrays, Maps, and Lists)

Impact:

• Existing documentation for the snmp-adaptor is deprecated.
• Customers using the old snmp-adaptor will be very likely to require changes to their setup in order to use the new one.
• Changes to code in the branch

The reason for this new adaptor is that the old one had some issues with following spec, and did not implement v2c operations, nor v3 authentication / encryption capabilities. The new adaptor addresses those issues while at the same time adding some nice new functionality.