Though the world now has a secure version of the Simple Network Management Protocol, whether it will be widely implemented is open to debate. While July and August ushered in the SNMP security standards, the same meetings saw the Internet Engineering Task Force presented with proposals, originally dubbed SMP, Simple Management Protocol but which have become the core of SNMP-2. The Task Force has set up a working group to develop SNMP-2 and the first meeting took place at the University of Tennessee. The confusion is summarised in the latest edition of The Simple Times, edited by Marshall Rose who is one of the authors of SNMP and the editor of SNMP-2. An article on the standardisation work says The result, unfortunately, is that the long process of designing security for SNMP was re-opened two weeks after it was thought to be completed. This suggests that it would be unwise to ship products based on these SNMP security RFCs and instead, to be prepared for change. SNMP-2 itself is being styled as an evolution to the current standard, and the authors say that current SNMP management information bases will be readily usable with the new standard and that there will be a relatively simple upgrade path to bring a base up to full SNMP-2 compatibility. The new features are intended to make SNMP more powerful, but the extended command set should make SNMP applications smaller through the provision of functions that previously needed laborious hand coding. Among the extensions are several additions to the Object-type definitions; 64-bit counters to avoid previous problems with registers that overflowed before the management station could service them; and better error codes for determining why SET requests fail.
