Re: What *should* Net-SNMP do with a busted resource?
Peter Martin <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.network.net-snmp.user |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Phil Smith III wrote: > We had a customer for whom net-snmp 5.2.2 was "broken" -- it would start, but as soon as anything tried to fetch the Host MIB, it would stop responding. After far too much hassle, we figured out that they had a busted cups install: any attempt to touch the sole defined cups printer would hang, whether through net-snmp or lpstat, lpadmin, et al. > > So, the customer says, "Shouldn't net-snmp handle this?" > > My first reaction is that since Linux was broken (essentially), the answer is "No", but I don't like that answer much. > > My colleague tells me that this may be handled better in 5.4, but since this is clearly a theology question, I put it to the list: what SHOULD happen? Is it reasonable for net-snmp to handle such a mess gracefully? Having experienced similar failures over the years,(with my own agent code as well - blush), I would say, the agent should be designed to be robust in the face of badly behaved or wrongly configured systems. After all, typing 'cat xyz' does not crash the shell if xyz is missing, so querying a resource that is broken should not crash the agent. Having to go round and restart several hundred agents on remote systems because someone queried a broken resource is not time well spent. Pete Martin ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Net-snmp-users mailing list [email protected] Please see the following page to unsubscribe or change other options: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/net-snmp-users