🗄️ ^(the) SNMP MIB Parser

If you have ever needed to deal with SNMP, and especially with SNMP in PHP you know how important accurate name to OID mappings are. This library offers that, and way more exposing the SNMP library - Net-SNMP - to PHP!

If you hated SNMP I hope this library can convince you to stop ;)

Basics

What's SNMP?

SNMP is a networking protocol allowing for information exchange between hosts, think about it like a REST from 1990s. While the protocol is certainly dated it's still used everywhere... and thus available on almost all network-enabled hardware.

Nowadays the SNMP is used mostly to pull metrics (e.g. list of devices connected to a WiFi access point, or free disk space on a server)... but nobody said it cannot be used to control your coffee pot!

So, what are MIBs?

MIB, or management information base, is a collection of textual files containing description of the data present on a remote system. Without these files most of the information is just a meaningless set of numbers and strings. Even worse, without MIBs you cannot request sysUpTime.0 but 1.3.6.1.2.1.1.3.0... yikes!

MIBs installed on a system calling a remote SNMP host allow for simple querying and validation of the data. They also describe exactly WHAT can be requested from the remote system.

What this library brings?

Almost every *nix system comes with Net-SNMP library and tools for it. For example to see the structure describing installed disks on a Synology NAS you can use a single command to print a nice tree:

% snmptranslate -Tp 'SYNOLOGY-DISK-MIB::diskTable'
+--diskTable(1)
   |
   +--diskEntry(1)
      |  Index: diskIndex, diskStatus
      |
      +-- ---- Integer32 diskIndex(1)
      |        Range: 0..2147483647
      +-- -R-- String    diskID(2)
      +-- -R-- String    diskModel(3)
      +-- -R-- String    diskType(4)
      +-- -R-- Integer32 diskStatus(5)
      |        Range: 1..5
      +-- -R-- Integer32 diskTemperature(6)

However, there's no programmatic access to all the information presented in that tree (and parsing it is a fragile nightmare).

Net-SNMP provides everything needed, and it's the library for SNMP interactions & MIB parsing. Unfortunately, it's written in C is , it has no PHP binding. Since MIB standard is in active development for close to 35 years, pretty much there are no fully compatible options other than Net-SNMP.

...but can't we use Net-SNMP in PHP?!

Yes! Since PHP 7.4 it's possible thanks to FFI. It's not easy, due to a ton of ancient-C magic present in many places, yet possible.
This library hides the complexity behind a nice object-oriented interface.

^{(example above is included in examples directory)}

Requirements

• PHP 7.4 (64-bit, since SNMP contains such types)
• Release version of libnetsnmp
  • macOS ships with it (/usr/lib/libnetsnmp.25.dylib), as well as all tools like snmptranslate
  • Linux will require installation of a package (e.g. Debian/Ubuntu: snmp)
  • Windows requires installation, Net-SNMP repository contains precompiled binaries

License

The library itself is MIT-licensed. However, the code uses & includes parts of Net-SNMP. The code source tree contains parts of Net-SNMP header files, as well as structures (e.g. constants) translated from C to PHP.
For details about NET-SNMP licensing see LICENSE-NETSNMP.

I'm not a lawyer, but this stuff is free & open-source and you can use it - just play fair and include the licenses ;)