3   What Is MIB Designer?

MIB Designer is a tool to visually create and edit MIB modules that comply with the Structure of Management Information (SMI) rules. With MIB Designer there is no need to be familiar with ASN.1 or SMI syntax notation. Providing tools like drag & drop of MIB nodes, error checking, and preview with syntax highlighting, MIB Designer makes writing MIBs a question of minutes - on nearly any operating system.

While designing MIBs with MIB Designer, its tree view with integrated SMI preview guarantees best overview of the MIB information. Its search function provides fast access to any portion of the MIB. The intuitive graphical user interface ensures building syntactically correct MIBs that will compile with all SMIv1 and SMIv2 compliant MIB compilers.

MIB Designer can be used to create new SMIv2 MIB modules but it can also be used to edit existing SMIv1 or SMIv2 MIB modules. Creating of SMIv1 MIB modules is not supported since the IETF requires new MIB modules to be written in SMIv, however you may create your MIB as SMIv2 and convert it back to SMIv1 for compability with SMIv1-only compilers (see “SMIv2 to SMIv1” on page 60).

The MIB Designer features are:

• Round-trip editing for SMIv1 and SMIv2 MIB modules.

• New MIB modules are automatically created using SMIv2.

MODULE-IDENTITY editing is supported via popup dialog only in order to enforce revision control.

• Supports editing all SMIv2 objects (including Agent-Capabilities) with popup dialogs and directly with the SMI object editor which has SMI syntax completion built-in (via <Ctrl>-<Space>)

• Intuitive graphical user interface with easy table editing.

• Preview of module and single objects with syntax highlighting.

• Text, HTML, XML, XML Schema (XSD), and PDF export of MIB modules.

• Formats and pretty prints existing and new MIB modules.

• Search MIB tree and MIB repository by regular expression

• Runs everywhere (where Java Runtime Environment 1.5 or later is available).

• Virtually unlimited Undo/Redo.

DEFVAL and DISPLAY-HINT clause content checking, for example, is not supported by most other MIB editors and compilers.

• Various consistency checks strictly following the SMIv1 and SMIv2 standard.

• Automatic refactoring of object references when the referred object is changed.

• Validates the SMI syntax of an edited MIB module or a single MIB object and selects invalid nodes in MIB tree and invalid SMI text in SMI editor window.

• Edit object references by selecting MIB objects from option menus.

• Easy import of MIB objects and textual-conventions from other MIB modules.

• Leniently import a MIB with minimized error checking in order to be able to correct it.

• Optional revision control of MIB modules to protect them against incompatible changes.

• Editing of several MIB modules at the same time with the ability to copy, cut, and paste objects between modules.

• Visual comparison of MIB modules. Differences are shown by colored nodes in the MIB tree; differences between objects are shown by underlined text in the SMI preview.

• MIB files and objects can be edited in a text editor supporting search and replace using Perl 5 regular expressions and syntax completion through <Ctrl>-<Space>.

• Edit and print MIB files with syntax highlighting.

• Integration of external tools by configuration, for example to issue SNMP requests, view a MIB module as PDF using a PDF viewer, generate program code from a MIB module or a set of MIB modules.

• Spell checking of entered text on the fly with correction suggestions.

• GZIP compression of compiled MIB modules in the MIB repository for less disk usage and faster loading of MIB files from disk storage.

• SMI conversion from v2 to v1 and vice versa  (with full undo/redo).

• Automated correction of some typical SMI(v2) syntax errors.