Implementing the SET operation in a MIB

I wanted to set the name of the current application being monitored and then use snmpget on values that depend on that setting. I realise this is not quite the snmp way but it's just what I need to monitor a particular application's current state. That way I can retrieve for example the current application's memory and CPU usage as a percentage value. The snmp tutorial isn't very forthcoming about the details of how to do this. In particular it doesn't tell you where the commandline oid and value are located. All you get are four parameters:

1. netsnmp_mib_handler *handler
2. netsnmp_handler_registration *reginfo
3. netsnmp_agent_request_info *reqinfo
4. netsnmp_request_info *requests

Try searching the net-snmp site for information about these structures. I couldn't find anything. After some experimentation I managed to work out that the value of an snmpset command is stored in requests->requestvb->val.string and its length in requests->requestvb->val_len. The OID is stored in requests->requestvb->name (an array of ints) and its length in requests->requestvb->name_length (consistent huh?). I ignored most of the SET states (MODE_SET_RESERVE1, MODE_SET_RESERVE2, MODE_SET_FREE, MODE_SET_ACTION and MODE_SET_UNDO), and just provided code for MODE_SET_COMMIT. (The other states are for allocating and deallocating temporary memory). The storage for the string is just a global variable in the module. I just declared it as

static char currentAppName[APP_NAME_LEN];

where APP_NAME_LEN is 128. On receipt of a MODE_SET_COMMIT command I just copy the value at requests->requestvb->val.string into currentAppName. Of course I put a check in to stop more than 128 bytes being copied. I'm not that dumb.

What's next?

The next task is to compute currentAppCPUUsage and currentAppMemoryUsage based on the currentAppName value.