Writing an SNMP Agent for Windows: SnmpAPI.Lib or MgmtAPI.lib?

3
votes

I need to write an SNMP agent on Windows for our company product.

SnmpApi.lib - It's my understanding that SnmpApi.lib allows you to create a full agent from scratch and probably requires more work. This, however, takes over the SNMP port and doesn't allow other agents to run and will take longer to code.

MgmtAPI.lib - This lib will allow one to create an extension to the already running Windows SNMP service and seems a more elegant approach to creating an Windows agent. However, I'm findining very little official MS documentation/examples on how to code such an agent. I've also read on another forum that this might be deprecated.

I've seen an Oreilly book out in the wild called "Windows NT SNMP" but I heard it uses deprecated libs or techniques. I don't know if this is true or not.

I've also seen libraries like SNMP++ that use the SnmpAPI.lib to create an agent, but again, this isn't as elegant as letting multiple sub-agents on the system via MgmtAPI.lib, it seems.

A few questions:

I heard that MgmtAPI.lib is legacy/deprecated. Is this true?

What's the best practice for creating a Windows SNMP agent?

What library should i be using?

Any other suggestions?

Thank you!

1
windowssnmpagent

1 Answers

2
votes

The default windows SNMP stack and framework is very limited in its ability. Unfortunately, your best solutions are probably found elsewhere (of which there are a number of external libraries and stacks). If you want one that is modular and allows sub-agents, then look into a stack that supports the AgentX protocol. That's a standardized SNMP subagent protocol and will let multiple sub-agents attach to a master agent.

But whatever you do, please pick a stack that supports SNMPv3 and use the security in it.

If you want a random stack example that is known to work well on windows, try Net-SNMP which is fairly popular among the "replace the SNMP stack on windows" crowd. But I'm also biased and associated with the project, so I'll end with saying: "it doesn't matter too much; pick any stack that supports both AgentX and SNMPv3".