Linux Appliance Design

B.4. The MIB

MIB stands for Management Information Base. That's a mouthful, but you can just think of it as a hierarchical naming scheme for a virtual database. This is a "virtual" database because the data may not exist anywhere in storage until the agent receives a request to read the data. When asked for an object (think of this as a field in a record in the database) the agent retrieves the information and returns it in a process that may involve getting multiple pieces of information from the managed system and computing the value to be returned. (You might think of this as a just-in-time database.) The very act of requesting a piece of information may trigger the creation of the value.

Although there is one universal addressing scheme, we ...