Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/06/28/die-snmp-die.html
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There’s nothing really remarkable about BGP still being a thing, there’s no point in replacing a thing that’s doing its job well enough. It’s something I deal with regularly and it’s not really “on fire” most of the time.
SNMP is a fantastically simple protocol to do what it does, and SNMPv3 supports crypto and authentication.
Yeesh.
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That’s the one that stuck out at me: SNMP definitely doesn’t get as much love as might be advisable (and the habit of shipping things with ridiculously wide open settings is unfortunate); but, like so much of the internet(and technology generally), it gets points not for being the optimal solution; but for being the solution that’s easy to do useful things with even across a wide variety of vendors and devices.
Most of the DMTF’s newer toys, even if better thought out, less so.
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Exactly. I use SNMP extensively, and it’s dead simple to use once you get over the fairly small learning curve. It uses microscopic amounts of bandwidth, provides data in a hierarchical fashion, and you can work with it in any programming language you want. Even if the language lacks direct SNMP libraries (kind of doubtful), there’s simple-to-use external applications that can get that information for you and pipe it in.
It requires a microscopic amount of computing power, as well. I realize computing power is pretty cheap these days, but if the thing doesn’t need a web server, I don’t want it to have one. That’s one less hole to plug, one less vector to exploit, and one less thing for me to have to generally worry about. SNMP hasn’t been replaced, because SNMP gets the job done pretty damned well.
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Well, we call Craigslist “Tinder” now for some reason, and I can’t seem to find all those charming Flash animations I used to see everywhere. That’s all I’ve noticed.
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Although the most popular implementation of BGP has, um, issues (yes, Cisco, I just called you out, suck it up) of manageability and control, the protocol itself is excellent for dealing with planetary scale peer networks.
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