[SNMP4J] Question about MacAddress

[Doug Fischer]

Ok, I understand much better now.  So here is my issue now, basically  
what I am doing is splitting the OctetString and then reading each  
one (by just doing a simple toString() on it) and appending that to a  
StringBuffer.  What I am seeing is that this works for the first 5  
elements of the MacAddress, but the 6th is not correct (shows up as  
something like 30:30:00 instead of 00, or 46:43:00 instead of FC).   
Why is that?  Maybe this is not the correct approach.

Thanks,
Doug

On May 23, 2007, at 1:22 PM, snmpguru wrote:

> MacAddress is a TEXTUAL-CONVENTION, not a "native" variable type.   
> It is
> defined in SNMPV2-TC:
>
> MacAddress ::= TEXTUAL-CONVENTION
>     DISPLAY-HINT "1x:"
>     STATUS       current
>     DESCRIPTION
>             "Represents an 802 MAC address represented in the
>             `canonical' order defined by IEEE 802.1a, i.e., as if it
>             were transmitted least significant bit first, even though
>             802.5 (in contrast to other 802.x protocols) requires MAC
>             addresses to be transmitted most significant bit first."
>     SYNTAX       OCTET STRING (SIZE (6))
>
> As you can see, a MacAddress is an OCTET STRING that is comprised of 6
> octets.  At the PDU level SNMP only knows this is an OCTET STRING,  
> it the
> responsibility of an SNMP manager (this is the piece you are  
> writing) to
> determine that this is in fact a respresentation of a MAC address  
> (usually
> from some form of loaded and compilied MIB, but it could be  
> hardcoded).
>
> Rob
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: snmp4j-bounces at agentpp.org [mailto:snmp4j- 
> bounces at agentpp.org] On
> Behalf Of Doug Fischer
> Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2007 12:30 PM
> To: snmp4j at agentpp.org
> Subject: [SNMP4J] Question about MacAddress
>
> I am making a request to get the mac address of a device.  When  
> this is
> returned it is of type OctetString, in the mib file, its syntax is
> MacAddress.  Why does this come to me as an OctetString?  Why is  
> there no
> MacAddress variable type in SNMP4J?  How can I deal with this?
>
> Thank you,
> Doug
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