For years, I have been looking for a good tool that I can use and recommend for viewing and parsing SNMP MIBs, and for making SNMP queries on devices. There are lots of them out there, but I wanted one that was simple, correct, would run cross-platform so that all Dartware customers could take advantage of the tool, and of course, inexpensive.

Mibble (http://mibble.org) has been evolving over the years. Its author, Per Cederberg has created a Java tool that not only browses MIBs, but also has many other facilities for handling MIB files. Dartware recently took a bit of time to add a few usability features, and now the tool is a very good MIB browsing tool. 

Why is Mibble Good?

1. It's simple. It offers the traditional three-pane view. On the left is a list of MIBs, and the tree of SNMP variables within the MIB. The top-right pane shows the MIB's text, or the definition of the selected variable. At the bottom-right is the "results pane" that shows the values returned from a SNMP query.
2. It's correct. Mibble has careful MIB parsing capabilities, and alerts you to errors in a MIB file. On the other hand, it's fairly lenient and will let you use virtually all MIBs.
3. It's cross-platform. It only needs Java 1.5 to work on Windows, MacOS X, Linux and Unix.
4. It's FREE! As a GPL'd program, you can download and use it at no cost.

Give Mibble a try. Read the Tech Note that describes it, or just download it from Dartware's site at: http://download.dartware.com/thirdparty/mibble-2.9.3-dartware.tgz

And I'd love to get your feedback: send it to me at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

InterMapper 5.2 (which entered beta-test this week) has a number of facilities that make it easy to write command-line probes that monitor various devices. These are described in a tech note at: 

http://www.intermapper.com/assorted-topics/642-noaa-temp

The tech note includes a custom probe that illustrates these new features - the probe retrieves the temperature from a NOAA weather feed.

I am pleased to note that InterMapper Flows 1.2 is now available. This release has a couple interesting features that give some new facilities. Although they're simple, they add some real value to the product...

Country flags - InterMapper Flows now shows flags to represent the country of origin for the various talkers/listeners it has identified.

Whois lookups - With a simple right-click, you can issue a "whois" query for the host computer in question. This information generally tells the host's Service Provider, its netblock and sometimes the AS number, and technical and administrative contact information.

Between these two features, InterMapper Flows now gives a better insight into who's using bandwidth, and where the traffic is coming from. In addition, it supports:

NetFlow version 7 - Older Cisco Catalyst switches support NetFlow version 7 (not v5 or v9), so we added this to make the Cisco's NetFlow configuration simpler.

Juniper jFlow and cFlow support - These two protocols are substantially similar to NetFlow version 5. We have now tested equipment that supports these protocols with InterMapper Flows and are pleased to report that they work as expected.

InterMapper Flows works with the InterMapper network monitoring software to provide a convenient, highly graphical view onto your network. We offer no-cost evaluation licenses as well as a free, non-expiring licenses for limited installations. You can download the software at http://intermapper.com/files.

I attended the NANOG (North American Network Operators Group - http://nanog.org) on Monday through Wednesday, 19-21 October. This led directly into the ARIN (American Registry for Internet Numbers - http://arin.net) meeting starting Tuesday afternoon.

The overwhelming theme of these two meetings is IPv6. It's coming - fast. The fact is that we'll run out of IPv4 addresses (the familiar four-byte addresses we're used to looking at, like 192.168.1.1) soon. There are only 26 unassigned blocks of 2**24 bit addresses (so-called /8 blocks) available. At the current rate of assignment, they will be used up in late 2011 or early 2012. There are some minor optimizations available, and some tricks for reclaiming part of the address space, but this is a fairly hard limit.

So IPv6 (which uses much longer 128-bit addresses) is the solution to this problem. Designed over a decade ago, its adoption took quite a while because there wasn't much of an economic incentive. With the end to "limitless IPv4 addresses", the imperative for IPv6 gets much stronger. There are many backbone providers who are ready and able to carry IPv6 traffic: this removes one of the hurdles to its adoption. The other is finding end users/companies to use IPv6.

NANOG and ARIN work on complementary points of the problem: NANOG people actually operate networks, and are familiar with the problems of actually making a network run reliably. ARIN is a policy organization, and they create the rules under which IPv4 and IPv6 addresses are assigned and allocated. Each group informs the deliberations of the other in a firm effort to keep policy and technical realities aligned.

Highlights from NANOG

• Paul Francis gave a good talk about Virtual Aggregation, a technique for extending the life of routers that cannot any longer hold the full routing table. His method involves making certain routers within an organization authoritative for routes to various "virtual prefixes" (usually /7 or /8 subnets); other routers in the organization send traffic to that router for transmission to the final destination. http://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog47/presentations/Monday/Francis_VirtualAgg_N47_Mon.pdf
• Did you ever wonder how data gets from your cell phone to Google? Nina Bargisen and Jan Chrillisen from TDC and David Kessens from Nokia gave an excellent overview of how Mobile Data works. http://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog47/abstracts.php?pt=MTQ4MCZuYW5vZzQ3&nm=nanog47
•  Aaron Hughes from 6connect told how to convert your network to dual-stack, running IPv6 alongside IPv4. Modern routing equipment has everything you need. His talk dispelled a lot of myths, and distills the steps down to a manageable number. http://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog47/presentations/Wednesday/Hughes_Kosters_fundamentals_N47_Wed.pdf
• Owen Delong from Hurricane Electric gave a programmer-oriented discussion of converting existing programs to use dual-stack IPv4 & IPv6. He had examples of both C and Perl code. http://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog47/presentations/Wednesday/Delong_Kosters_Port_N47_Wed.pdf Owen's second slide also contains a nice graph of the IPv4 exhaustion rate.

Highlights from ARIN

As a deliberative policy body, the ARIN talks that I attended presented various policy proposals, and then let the attendees speak their merits and disadvantages. I was struck that the discussion, ably moderated by John Curran, the CEO of ARIN, was cooperative, thoughtful and respectful, free of the grandstanding that one might expect in such a body. I could only stay for the first day of the ARIN meeting, but there were proposals including:

• IANA policy for handing out AS Numbers. (The controversy is that there are a relatively small number of 16-bit Autonomous System Numbers left. They were discussing the policy issues involved in allocating 32-bit AS Numbers.)
• A discussion of the policy regarding recovering LAME address space. Under what circumstances can ARIN un-assign IPv4 address space when they conclude that the assignee is out of business/not using it/etc.