how should agents handle an 'out-of-range' index ?

I've been coding and testing my 'client agent' test suite,
and while testing it against Net-SNMP (5.4.2.1) on Fedora 8
I've been able to lock up the client.

The test I am performing is:

'Test that end of table handling properly goes to the next variable.'

I do this by:

'Determine the last column in a table, use a BIG index, and do a getNext().'

I expect the agent to return the next instance of the next variable
following the table in question.

When I ran this test, the agent died and needed to be restarted.
The variable I was querying was:

1.3.6.1.4.1.2021.8.1.103.4294967295  aka 'UCD-SNMP-MIB:extIndex'.

(FYI. it also happens on other variables.)

Now I see that:

a) The definition of the variable says that the valid range is:
    SYNTAX  Integer32 (0..65535)
b) the net-snmp's snmpgetnext command line tool prevents me from using a BIG
index

however ... my tool (right now) doesn't obey the range hint
BUT ... shouldn't the agent be more robust to protect itself against random
queries?

Although this may have been addressed/fixed in newer versions of Net-SNMP
(which I haven't tested yet), what is the general rule-of-thumb?
Should I be allowed to do this (without killing the agent) ?

Fulko

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