Following the announcement of approval of elements of the SNMP2 proposal (CI No 2,149), Westford, Massachusetts-based consultancy Paul Freeman Associates says that a combined SNMP 1/2 version of its Universal SNMP Agent will be announced very soon. Agent sources will cost $8,000; existing customers will be able to upgrade to the joint version for $800. Announcement of a version of the Agent characterised for Unix System V.4/386 is also imminent. Evaluation versions are available now; the company says, and the extensible binary version will cost $50 for single copies with volume reductions. The Universal SNMP Agent is designed for companies that want to manage net nodes in a reliable, predictable way. The Intel version shares the capabilities of the portable source Unix version and is said to be easy to install. The next target operating system is any Unix with a network subsystem derived from BSD 4.3. This version should be available in a month or so and will possibly be followed by a Solaris version. As a means of encouraging customer and third party Management Information Base development, the consultancy has available MIB2 source code for System V.4 available free of charge to existing Agent customers. This code enables users to produce a complete working Agent for installation in an System V.4 environment in minutes. By midsummer, Paul Freeman hopes to offer run-time Management Information Base loading and unloading. Disk-resident MIBs will be able to be loaded and activated dynamically as well as unloaded and de-activated in order to free memory.
