Re: snmpEngineBoots

On Mon, 5 May 2003, Ann Lo wrote:
> Thanks for your information. I guess that this definition has originated
> from the Unix system where the SNMP protocol can be operational when the
> SNMP agent is down?

No ...

> In many embedded systems, snmpEngineBoots would then start from 1 as these
> systems would not respond to any SNMP requests until the SNMP agent is up
> and running.

That's the way it always works.  snmpEngineBoots is set to 0 before
the engine boots.  It is incremented to 1 the first time the agent
boots.  Hence the minimum value reported by the managed object is 1.

This is true irrespective of what platform upon which the agent runs.

This seems to cause confusion, and I am sorry that I am explaining
poorly, but there is no contradiction between RFC 3414, which instructs
an implementor to initialise snmpEngineBoots to 0, and the MIB module
in RFC 3411, which specifies that the minimum value ever read from
snmpEngineBoots (via an SNMP GetRequest-PDU) will be 1.

//cmh