Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: [Ethereal-dev] Re: [PATCH] SNMP Engine ID dissection

[Wes Hardaker <wjhns36@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>>>> On Mon, 15 Aug 2005 21:51:55 +0200, Thomas Anders <thomas.anders@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> said:

Thomas> That's exactly what this code intends to deal with! Once you see what 
Thomas> your arbitrary-looking engine ID is built upon, it's much easier to 
Thomas> decide how likely it is to be unique within your management domain. How 
Thomas> many people will spot the problem with e.g. 0x80001f88017f000001 w/o 
Thomas> Ethereal? ;-)

Well, and my point is that snmp implementations should be able to deal
with the above regardless of whether there is a problem with the
encoding.  If treated as an arbitrary number of bytes, like most
implementations do, then it still works regardless of whether or not
the actual contents of those bytes matter.  Now in the above case,
that's a bad implementation on the agent's side because it failed to
create a likely unique engineID.  But my only point is you need to be
careful and not make assumptions about the format as always being
true.  IE, make sure the code doesn't crash on: 0x80001f88017f0000

-- 
Wes Hardaker
Sparta, Inc.