Wireshark · Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] snmp decoding ...ubuntu smi issue ?... different then on windows XP ...?

[Andrew Hood <ajhood@xxxxxxxxx>]

Apologies in advance for the tone, but some actions are inexcusable.

Jaap Keuter wrote:
> 
> Hi, 
> 
> Some history: 
> 
> libsmi doesn't provide MIBs any more, due to
> Debian bug 498476 [7] 

The bug belongs to Debian, not libsmi. limsmi provides MIBs. Debian
chooses to not include them.

> MIB installation was spun out into an
> independent package snmp-mibs-downloader [8] 
> 
> This package downloads
> the MIBs directly from their source [9], so these are not cleaned up for
> libsmi. 

Debian is choosing to use the MIB writers version - not the one in
libsmi's source. They would rather have an unusable package than a
working one.

The better solution would have been for Debian to package the whole of
libsmi as non-free, or for Wireshark to provide a Debian safe version
without SNMP support.

IANA and IETF provided MIBs have numerous syntax errors. The libsmi
authors have gone to a lot of trouble to correct the MIBs they provide
in their codebase. I can not think of a single manufacturer whose MIBs
will all go into libsmi without some syntactic and semantic corrections.

NetSNMP does not have the same level of strictness in its parser, so it
was not a problem until the switch was made to libsmi.

FYI OpenNMS runs into the same problems with faulty MIBs.

Andrew
-- 
There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes.
                -- Dr. Who