3Com 10014298 manual Architecture of the MIB Tree

266CHAPTER 11: SYSTEM MANAGEMENT

In terms of structure, SNMP can be divided into two parts, NMS and Agent. NMS (Network Management Station) is the workstation for running the client program. At present, the commonly used NM platforms include Sun NetManager and IBM NetView. The agent is the server software operated on network devices. NMS can send GetRequest, GetNextRequest, and SetRequest messages to the agent. Upon receiving the requests from the NMS, the agent will perform a read or write operation according to the message types, and generate and return the response message to NMS. On the other hand, the agent will send a trap message on its own initiative to NMS to report events whenever the device encounters any abnormalities.

Configuring SNMP is described in the following sections:

■SNMP Versions and Supported MIB

■Configuring SNMP

SNMP Versions and To uniquely identify the management variables of a device in SNMP messages, Supported MIB SNMP adopts the hierarchical naming scheme to identify the managed objects. It

is like a tree. A tree node represents a managed object, as shown in the figure below. Thus the object can be identified with the unique path starting from the root.

Figure 62 Architecture of the MIB Tree

	1
1		2
	1	2
1	B	2
5		6

A

The MIB (Management Information Base) is used to describe the hierarchical architecture of the tree, and is the set defined by the standard variables of the monitored network device. In the above figure, the managed object B can be uniquely specified by a string of numbers {1.2.1.1}. The number string is the Object Identifier of the managed object.