Re: [Tsp-devel] [RFC] Generating a BB from MIBS

[Eric Noulard]

2007/2/27, Frederik Deweerdt <address@hidden>:
> Hi,
>
> I'm working on a MIB -> BB exporter that we plan to integrate to TSP
> if you think it is interesting. The script we takes an SNMP MIB,
> parses it, and we generate a black board containing all the variables
> available in the MIB. An SNMP agent is then launched and the BB
> variables are accessible via SNMP.

I find this a great idea since SNMP is a long-term standard protocol
which is suited for asynchronous read/write access whereas TSP
was meant for "synchronous" read access.
> From my point of view this is just fill-in the gap perfectly.

> The proposed modus operandi is the following:
> Step 1: The lib is executed, it registers a blackboard and a SNMP agent

I'm not sure to understand that step.
What lib? The one generated by the script who parsed xml to produce C?

Who call this lib, the user program who want to offer SNMP access?

> Step 2: The programs willing to use those variables attach themselves
> to the blackboard, subscribe to the variables and use the BB's message
> API to register (and later receive) SNMP events.
>
> We plan to provide an API to access to the black board variables
> through setters and getters. There will be 4 versions of it:
> - Simple setter/getter directly accesses the shared memory
> - Locked setter/getter locks the BB before setting/getting the shared memory
> - Event generating setter: sends an message to the programs that
> registered a listener on a particular variable
> - Locked event generating setter, see above :)

Don't know SNMP lib very well but does the API you want to add
to BB just mimic the SNMP lib API?

As we already discussed BB core should remain simple and small API,
ideally this kind of API should be built around "genuine BB core".

> The script is written in Ruby (the anguage for fast, easy programming
> ;) ) and generates C. It's still under developpement. Any thoughts?

Yes I would be very interested in being able to offer SNMP access
to application which already use a BB.

Would it be possible (?and how difficult?) to write
some kind of bb_dump_snmp which may dump a MIB
out of a already built BB?

The idea is the following:

0) You have a program that is already using BB lib

1) You dump
   bb_dump mybb -f SNMP_MIB -o mybb.mib

2) Run your  ?generic? snmp agent which is able
    to attach itself to the BB

May be we even don't need 1) and your agent is already able
to attach itself to the BB and offer SNMP access?

--
Erk