[Twisted-Python] twisted pysnmp status

[Justin Warren]

On Thu, 2007-03-29 at 15:41 -0400, Mike C. Fletcher wrote:
> Brendan Simon wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I just wanted to know what the latest status is with twisted and pysnmp.
> > Is pysnmp 4.x supported?
> > Is full SNMPv3 supported?
> > What is the roadmap and/or plans for twisted and pysnmp ???
> PySNMP 4.x was, the last time I looked at it (probably more than a year 
> ago, now), *far* too slow for our client's purposes (monitoring 10,000+ 
> cable modems).  In fact, even PySNMP 3.x was too slow (even with our 
> speed enhanced version).  We *needed* to be able to scale up to well 
> beyond 40,000+ cable modems per (reasonable) scanning box to have a 
> chance in the market where DSLAMs/CMTSs have that number of modems on a 
> single chasis (and 100s of thousands per head end).  As a result, we had 
> to defer on the product's biggest potential market.
> 
> SNMPv3 is not supported with TwistedSNMP.  We hacked in PySNMP 4.x, 
> discovered it just couldn't be used for our purposes and dropped the 
> porting effort before it was completed (which would have included the 
> SNMPv3 interfaces).

The performance of PySNMP (many years ago) was the main reason we wrote
libsnmp; PySNMP seemed to have been written from a very CompSci
perspective with full abstract ASN.1 model that gets subclassed to SNMP
via many steps, all of which slow it down. We went for a more
engineering approach, hardcoding lookup tables for values that never
change for the specific ASN.1 instanciation that is SNMP, for example.

libsnmp isn't integrated into twisted, though we do use it with twisted
with great success in seafelt; there has been some interest in
integrating libsnmp with twisted in recent times. libsnmp also lacks
SNMPv3 support, only because we haven't had a need to add it yet, but
this means it probably doesn't meet your needs.

However, I am interested in both of these goals: twisted integration,
and SNMPv3 support, so perhaps if there enough people interested in such
an outcome we could work together to achieve it?

-- 
Justin Warren <daedalus at eigenmagic.com>