“SNMP Mastery” tech reviewers wanted

I’ve just finished the first draft of SNMP Mastery, and I’m looking for folks interested in pointing out my mistakes and misunderstandings.

If you’ve got the time to read the book and comment, please drop me an email at mwl at mwl dot io saying:

• your degree of SNMP expertise
• that you won’t share the draft manuscript. (I don’t need piracy of unproofed manuscripts to ruin my reputation, the finished books do enough harm, thank you.)

I would need all comments back before Monday, 13 January 2020. All comments need to be in plain text with enough context that I can find the bit you’re talking about, or annotations on the PDF. While I appreciate the madman who took the time send me PostScript diffs, I am insufficiently geeky to cope with them in the time allotted. With luck I’ll have it in time for AsiaBSDCon and HasGeek in March.

This book is written with a Lovecraftian cosmic horror motif. Because

We’re left with a protocol that’s incredibly powerful and flexible, but bears all the scars of its history. SNMP lets you invoke ancient standards from the void. It grants you incredible system-changing power, and can destroy everything you’ve worked for. SNMP exposes the secrets of your servers, and—if you’re thoughtless—reconfigures them into unspeakable nightmares. It’s like something out of an HP Lovecraft tale, without the rampant xenophobia but with all the alien system topologies.¹

¹The topologies were there all along. Your shallow human mind was blissfully incapable of perceiving them.
This whole analogy is disturbingly apropos.

Here’s the Table of Contents

• Introduction
• SNMP Essentials
• Authentication
• Queries
• The Management Information Base
• The Net-SNMP Agent
• Logging
• SET
• Proxies, SMUX, and AgentX
• Access Control
• Extending snmpd(8)
• Monitoring
• Traps
• Afterword

What comes next? I’ve been writing twelve hours a day for the past two weeks to finish this book on time. What comes next is a heartfelt faceplant. Hopefully onto the couch, but if I hit the bed of nails that’s okay.