The Management Information Base

As mentioned in the earlier discussion, the Management Information Base (MIB) defines variables, and those variables enable the management software to monitor/control the network device. Formally, the MIB defines each variable as an object ID (OID). The MIB then organizes the OIDs based on RFC standards into a hierarchy of OIDs, usually shown as a tree.

The MIB for any given device includes some branches of the MIB tree with variables common to many networking devices and branches with variables specific to that device. RFCs define some common public variables, and most all devices implement these MIB variables. In addition, networking equipment vendors like Cisco can define their own private branches of the tree ...

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