Re: read_objid() capability to interpret strings

[Juergen S. <sc...@ib...>]

In article <sde...@wa...> you wrote:
>>>>>> On 21 Nov 2000 22:29:34 -0000, ni...@ba... (Niels Baggesen) said:

> Wes> 8:24am wanderer [189]: ./snmptranslate -IR system.\"blue\"
> Wes> Unknown object identifier: system."blue"

> Niels> That was not intended, I will fix it (although I have
> Niels> difficulty seing the use for it)

> That wasn't a good example.  A better example would be a table that I
> don't have a mib for (possibly because it hasn't been written to match
> the code for yet).  I'd certainly want to be able to easily index oids
> based on values even though the first half of them were entirely
> numeric.

This is _NOT_ possible. You need to know how a table is indexed to form
the instance identifier. In particular, you need to know whether a string
is fixed length or not. If it is variable length, then you need to know
whether an implied bit applies.

So any code which does an automatic conversion based on a best guess
is just flawed. And this can have more than unpleasant side effects if
it is being used in a VACM configuration file. So please, don't do it.

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder      Technical University Braunschweig
<sc...@ib...>  Dept. Operating Systems & Computer Networks
Phone: +49 531 391 3289    Bueltenweg 74/75, 38106 Braunschweig, Germany
Fax:   +49 531 391 5936    <URL:http://www.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de/~schoenw/>