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%	$Header: libbsd.tex,v 1.1 89/01/15 19:59:29 jrd Exp $
%	Author: J. Davin
%	Copyright 1988, 1989, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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\subsection{The BSD Library}

The BSD library realizes some of the support necessary to
construct network management applications in a BSD 4.3 UNIX
environment.
Sources for the BSD library reside in the
\verb"bsd" subdirectory of the Development Kit
distribution hierarchy.

One sort of support afforded by the BSD library is provision
of the relatively trivial transport services
required for the operation of the SNMP protocol.

Another sort of support afforded by the BSD library is
that of accumulating from the operating environment
those items of management information identified
in RFC 1066 as part of the Internet standard
MIB. The BSD library code that realizes
this function is provided only to illustrate how the
Development Kit can be used to
accelerate the construction of network management agents.
The particular items of management information
addressed in the BSD library code are selected for their
value in illustrating some
aspect of using the Development Kit; no claims are made
that the MIB subset supported by this code is
one particularly well-suited to effective network management.
Nor should the strategies by which this code extracts
management information from the UNIX environment be regarded
as necessarily optimal.

A network management agent based exclusively on the support
of the Development Kit BSD library in its current form is not
fully compliant
with RFC 1066, and, accordingly, should not be deployed for
purposes other than experimentation.

