Hi Simon,
This will be short, but I hope it helps.
The Printer MIB is one of many IETF standards track MIBs
(Management Information Bases) which are accessed via the
IETF SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol).
In general, the Printer MIB is for monitoring of current
configuration (paper loaded in trays, etc.) and NOT for
reconfiguration of printers. Reconfiguration is still
usually accomplished by vendor private MIBs or by other
protocols (not SNMP).
I've forwarded to you (below) a note on an interesting
software tool ('libsmi' C library) that was originally
posted to the IETF SNMPv3 Working Group mailing list
last month.
To learn about SNMP you'll need a good book. There are
many available at technical bookstores. To learn about
MIBs, one of the best books is 'Understanding SNMP MIBs'
by David Perkins and Evan McGinnis, ISBN 0-13-437708-7.
To remotely browse MIBs on managed network devices, you
can use NMS (network management station) software, such
as HP OpenView, Intel LanDesk, Novell ManageWise, etc.
You may also want to the visit the home page of the IETF
(Internet Engineering Task Force) at 'http://www.ietf.org'
and join the mailing list of one or more IETF working
groups (although they are NOT appropriate places to ask
basic questions about SNMP, but they can be good places
to increase your knowledge).
Good luck with your researches,
- Ira McDonald (consulting architect at Sharp Labs America)
President, High North Inc
-----Original Message-----
From: Frank Strauss [mailto:strauss at ibr.cs.tu-bs.de]
Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2000 2:59 AM
To: libsmi at ibr.cs.tu-bs.de
Cc: mibs at ops.ietf.org; snmpv3 at lists.tislabs.com; csmall at debian.org;
gregm at comstar.net; saper at system.pl
Subject: libsmi-0.2 announcement
Libsmi 0.2 is available for download.
Copyright (c) 1999,2000 Frank Strauss, Technical University of Braunschweig.
Libsmi is a C library that allows network management applications to
access SMI MIB module information through a well defined API that
hides the nasty details of locating and parsing SMIv1/v2 MIB modules.
Libsmi supports exact and iterative retrieval functions for all major
SMIv1 and SMIv2 constructs.
The layered concept of libsmi allows to add further methods to
retrieve MIB information from persistent repositories. In fact,
besides the SMIv1/v2 MIB file parser an additional parser for `SMIng',
a new structure of management information elaborated by the Network
Management Research Group of the IRTF, is included. Both parsers are
built on flex/bison grammar specifications.
There are three tools on top of the library and a sh/awk-script:
Smiquery allows simple queries for single MIB module items. Smilint
allows to increase the verbosity of the parser(s), so that MIB module
files can be checked for syntax and semantic errors. Smidump can be
used to dump MIB modules in various formats. The current output
backends allow to dump trees of OIDs, type definitions and recursive
imports, to convert modules between SMIv1, SMIv2 and SMIng, to produce
JIDM compliant CORBA-IDL files, UCD-SNMP code stubs and MOSY style
output. Finally, smistrip allows to strip SMIv1/v2 modules from
documents like RFCs and Internet-Drafts.
Enclosed with the libsmi package, there are all (bug fixed) current
IETF standard MIB modules, as well as some other modules, man pages
for all library functions and tools, the current SMIng specification
and a libsmi test suite.
The software comes with automake/autoconf and libtool support. Hence
it should compile and build with or without shared libraries on most
UNIX style platforms, as well as on W32/cygwin, though it's just
developed on Sun Solaris 2.5.x and Linux.
For those familiar with recent libsmi development: The API has changed
significantly to allow much more efficient lookups during runtime.
This means you have to adjust your applications when you skip from
libsmi 0.1.x to 0.2.
Online information on libsmi together with download and CVS access
information, the (free) license terms, manual pages, and a mailing
list is available at:
http://www.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de/projects/libsmi/
Information on the SMIng project is available at:
http://www.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de/projects/sming/
Enjoy!
Frank Strauss <strauss at ibr.cs.tu-bs.de>