A software blog

This is the most downloaded piece of software out of the various softwares at this site. It is also the only software for which a potential costumer had run a test suite against, and the only problem he had found were related to some edge case in error reporting inherited from the underlying net-snmp stack.

The errors which were found were insignificant for any real world usage (I assume that taking into account the popularity of the net-snmp stack, if they were significant they would have been fixed long ago), but the breaking of the deal which forced me to return to a normal day job have depressed me and I have not bothered to analyze and report them to the net-snmp project.

In the year which had passed since then, there some shift in the server market and there are now more servers running windows 2003 64 bit version. Since the agent in its current state is a 32-bit application, it can not access the SNMP DLL’s which are supplied by microsoft which are 64 bit. I havn’t tried it, but I assume that you can’t run the agent on a 64 bit OS.

For now the software is in maintenance mode. If you find bugs, or has a suggestions for minor improvements, I will try to make the necessary code changes.

Assuming someone will be willing to sponser the work, or I will come up with a working buisness plan, this is the current list of features I would like to add in future:

1. 64 bit OS support
2. MSI installer
3. GUI candy for defining snmpv3 views by browsing the agent mibs and data
4. upgrade to the latest net-snmp stack

In February 2002 I have left my job as Project manager/Software architect/code monkey at XOR Technologies. In this position I have done most of things related to SNMP. I have designed MIBs, developed SNMP agents, developed proxies to SNMP agent, developed Element Management Systems, and integrated software with higher hierarchy management platform like HPOV NNM.

Back then, the SNMP world consisted of tools which were not friendly to developers and did not support the process by which SNMP software (agent and management) software is developed. I thought that I know better, that I have Ideas which may simplify and reduce the cost of SNMP software development. So instead of going hunting for a new job, I started to develop software, with a hope to sell it via the internet.

In 2005 I wasn’t shocked to discover that the time I was willing to leave on savings has run out, and the commercial result were very poor, and took a normal day job. Having a day job and not seeing any profit from the software I developed, caused me to neglect it, and it didn’t help that the spam in the PHPBB forums I had, killed their usefulness.

But now I am once again out of a day job, and until I will find a new one, I have decided to put some effort in reorganizing my software in hope that someone will find it useful (and maybe I will be able to make some money of it ;)).

Hopefully, the wordpress CMS/blogging platform used here, is much more suitable to the kind of low traffic discussions I hope to have here.