braa 0.8 review
DownloadBraa is a tool for making SNMP queries
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Braa is a tool for making SNMP queries. It is a software able to query hundreds or thousands of hosts simultaneously, while being completely single-threaded.
The intended usage of such a tool is of course making SNMP queries - but unlike snmpget or snmpwalk from net-snmp, it is able to query dozens or hundreds of hosts simultaneously, and in a single process. Thus, it consumes very few system resources and does the scanning VERY fast.
Braa implements its OWN snmp stack, so it does NOT need any SNMP libraries like net-snmp. The implementation is very dirty, supports only several data types, and in any case cannot be stated 'standard-conforming'! It was designed to be fast, and it is fast. For this reason (well, and also because of my laziness ;), there is no ASN.1 parser in braa - you HAVE to know the numerical values of OID's (for instance .1.3.6.1.2.1.1.5.0 instead of system.sysName.0
Requirements:
an *IX system implementing BSD sockets and some POSIX syscalls large ARP table - if you plan to query thousands of hosts, make sure your system is capable of managing thousands of ARP entries, for instance tune the gc_thresh values in Linux...
it is also good to have a complete SNMP package installed somewhere, because braa accepts only numerical OID's, so you may need to make use of snmptranslate.
Braa is not at all portable - it was tested only on several setups:
Linux (shaerrawedd 2.4.19-xfs #7 Fri Oct 4 18:18:38 CEST 2002 i686 unknown)
FreeBSD (venom 4.6.2-RELEASE-p10 FreeBSD 4.6.2-RELEASE-p10 #0: Tue Mar 25 12:59:45 CET 2003 root@venom:/usr/src/sys/compile/VENOM-3 i386)
OpenBSD (pantera 3.3 PANTERA#0 i386)
With minor adjustments, braa should also work under SunOS, and actually, any POSIX-compilant UNIX system. The problem is I just do not have access to any machines running something different than BSD or Linux.
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