snmpwalk continue/start with option

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I apologize if posting this here creates duplicate traffic, I just
submitted this at http://www.net-snmp.org/patches/.

We encounter a problem from time to time with broken snmp agents. These
agents will at some point during an snmpwalk deliver a bad value or in some
manner cause the walk to abort.

In these cases, we still want to see the remainder of the MIB tree, but
this is difficult, given that we now have to iteratively perform walks over
the remaining subtrees.

As an alternative, we modified the snmpwalk code to allow an option "start
with" option so that the walk will start with a specified OID and continue
until the full tree has been traversed.

Use case:

snmpwalk 1.3.6.1.4.1.foo (for some organization foo who deliver a broken
agent)

This aborts on OID 1.3.6.1.4.1.foo.x.y.z. In order to walk the remainder
of the tree, this new option now allows

snmpwalk -W 1.3.6.1.4.1.foo.x.y.z 1.3.6.1.4.1.foo

(Other options omitted for clarity.)

Perhaps this doesn't make sense for general users, I don't know. But we
found it useful, so we figured we'd submit it.

Patch was made against version 5.3.1, though snmpwalk.c does not appear to
have changed since then.

I've tested this on Windows XP, Solaris 9, and SuSE Linux 9.3/Kernel
2.6.11.4-21.12, though it really is a pretty minor change.

I'd also be curious to see discussion of alternate approaches to handling
this problem, if patching snmpwalk was in some way overkill. :)

Regards,

Pete Rijks



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