SNMP .NET

The real need for a good SNMP library for .NET hasn't been really big. Lately, I've been using NET-SNMP in my apps using P/INVOKE. Might post some code later.

Well I've been spending my time helping out the Debian Linux team and busy working. I've got some intersting stuff done there. I've helped with what I've learned to get SNMP libraries into Mono. Well now Mono is 1.0 and thankfully has a basic support for ASN.1 which is the first big step to SNMP.

My interest in this project has been renewed with the Mono project pushing forward as fast as it has.

I started this project because of the lack of resources for the older, but still highly used SNMP protocol. The SNMP protocol still remains the de facto standard when it comes to network monitoring and management.

I was trying to write an application that would monitor Lucent (formally Ascend) MAX RAS servers, as well as a few Cisco 2600/2700 routers. I figured that .NET would have something written for it that would work with SNMP like the SNMP agents and handlers in Java, Perl, PHP, and a few hundred other languages. I guess it was my fault that I figured that about a Microsoft centric programming language. I needed to keep writing it in C# because I had already got so far in other parts of the application.

I was forced to learn the SNMP protocol from scratch. I figured it wouldn't be that hard since it's called Simple Network Management Protocol. When they said simple, they meant that it was a simple subset of a few other standards that C# didn't have any support for ether. I didn't know how complex such a venture would be, but I knew it could be done.