Updating MIBs for New Devices

Network hardware vendors frequently enhance the SNMP agents for their equipment, either to support new functionality or to accommodate an erratum. New equipment added to the network may have a corresponding new MIB. It therefore becomes necessary to unload the old MIB and load the new one. This has to be done at each collection station and management station.

In preparation for loading the updated or new MIB, copy the ASCII file into the $OV_SNMP_MIBS directory. NNM includes a simple GUI to load and unload MIBs from this location. First unload the old MIB, then load the new one. This has the side effect of deleting old trap definitions and loading the new ones. When this step is done, use the MIB browser to check that the MIB works with the intended device, and that the snmpCollect historical SNMP data collection definitions are updated as necessary to reflect the new MIB.

Note that you can load/unload MIBS from the command line with xnmloadmib, but it does not process traps by default. You need to explicitly specify this with the -event option.