SNMP Mac ID formatting issue - snmp

I need clarity related MAC SNMP oid .1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.6.
The oid is retrieving data in two formats - octet string and hex string. Ex:
1) octet string .1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.6.2 STRING: 00:01:80:5c:df:1c
2) hex string. .1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.6.1 STRING: 30:30:3a:30:30:3a:30:30:3a:30:30:3a:30:30:3a:30:30
Hence while writing code logic, we need to handle both variety. But How to identify the retrieving data is octet string or hex string? Is this related to little endian or big endian concept? Any OID will provide us inform type of data. Kindly help.

This is specified in the relevant MIB. You should work with MIBs, not just numerical OIDs out of context. An OID just tells you which object is being referred to, but there is so much more information in the MIB about those objects, including their type and how they ought to be interpreted.
In fact there is no such thing as a HEX STRING; these are usually OCTET STRINGs with a display-hint that they should be shown to the user in hex-pair notation.
OCTET STRINGs don't have endianness; they're strings. Sequences.

Related

SNMP4J - OID Output Options - Hex-STRING as STRING

I'm using SNMP4J to read info of devices with SNMP. Now I found some devices which represent the system name (OID iso.3.6.1.2.1.1.5.0) as a Hex-STRING instead of a STRING.
To show the system name I use the following code:
Variable var = response.getVariable(new OID(".1.3.6.1.2.1.1.5.0"));
System.out.println(var.toString());
Where response is a PDU object.
If the system name is represented as a STRING value, this goes as I expected. When it is represented as a Hex-STRING, it just prints the Hex value.
Example:
Take the name of the system as "SYSTEM NAME".
With STRING it prints "SYSTEM NAME".
With Hex-STRING it prints "53:59:53:54:45:4d:20:4e:41:4d:45"
Now with snmpwalk in command line I can just use the -Oa flag. This makes all Hex-STRING values show as STRING. Is it possible to use this flag in SNMP4J or is there a similar option?
I'm not sure where you're getting the term "Hex-STRING" from. SNMP does not define such a data type. I suggest you read through the relevant RFC documents, they are publicly available from IETF. The wikipedia article for SNMP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Network_Management_Protocol#References) has an excellent reference list, you can start with browsing the ones marked as "STD".
In SNMP, all strings are subtypes (or in a different word, "restrictions") of OCTET-STRING, a byte string of indeterminate length. It may contain any data, even non-printable stuff, representing a jpeg image or whatever.
Some textual-conventions have been defined, which restrict the data to some specific byte range, or length. A DisplayString is defined to only contain bytes from the NVT ASCII character set, so the user may trust it to be printable.
In fact, sysName is defined to be a DisplayString with a max length of 255 characters.
sysName OBJECT-TYPE
SYNTAX DisplayString (SIZE (0..255))
Since a good SNMP manager is aware of RFC1213-MIB, which defines both sysName and DisplayString, the manager should assume that the data received is printable ASCII characters.
When you say "When it is represented as a Hex-STRING", what do you mean? "Represented" where, on the agent or in your Java code or when using the net-snmp "snmpwalk" command?
The var.toString() call should convert the contents of the variable into something that could be safely printed in a terminal, so it's possible that SNMP4j is converting any binary string to a hex string.

CredentialProvider does not accept passwords with special (German) letters

I wrote a CredentialProvider that allows to log in to Windows. But today I found out this strange error that GetSerialization() seems not to accept passwords which contain the German 'umlaut' letters like 'ä' or 'ü'. Does anyone know the solution?
Thanks in advance
It'll depend on the details of the format in which GetSerialization() returns the password.
If your CredentialProvider returns a serialized KERB_INTERACTIVE_UNLOCK_LOGON structure, as the standard password provider does, then the username, password, and domain name values in the structure must all be passed as UNICODE_STRING values. Note that UNICODE_STRING is a structure that contains current length and maximum length values and a buffer of 16-bit Unicode (UTF-16LE) characters. As they're Unicode they can certainly hold letters with umlauts.
However, if your CredntialProvider handles the password in a narrow character buffer you may be handling your umlaut characters as 8-bit Windows CP1252 characters. You'll need to convert those to 16-bit Unicode before placing them in the KERB_INTERACTIVE_UNLOCK_LOGON structure and serializing it.

UTF-8 string delimiter

I am parsing a binary protocol which has UTF-8 strings interspersed among raw bytes. This particular protocol prefaces each UTF-8 string with a short (two bytes) indicating the length of the following UTF-8 string. This gives a maximum string length 2^16 > 65 000 which is more than adequate for the particular application.
My question is, is this a standard way of delimiting UTF-8 strings?
I wouldn't call that delimiting, more like "length prefixing". Some people call them Pascal strings since in the early days the language Pascal was one of the popular ones that stored strings that way in memory.
I don't think there's a formal standard specifically for just that, as it's a rather obvious way of storing UTF-8 strings (or any strings of bytes for that matter). It's defined over and over as a part of many standards that deal with messages that contain strings, though.
UTF8 is not normally de-limited, you should be able to spot the multibyte characters in there by using the rules mentioned here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Description
i would use a delimiter which starts with 0x11......
but if you send raw bytes you will have to exclude this delimiter from the data\messages processed ,this means that if there is a user input similar to that delimiter, you will have to convert it.
if the user inputs any utf8 represented char you may simply send it as is.

Make UUID shorter (Hex to ASCII conversion)

In my web application one model uses identifier that was generated by some UUID tool. As I want that identifier to be part of the URL I am investigating methods to shorten that UUID string. As it is currently is in hexadecimal format I thought about converting it to ASCII somehow. As it should afterwards only contain normal characters and number ([\d\w]+) the normal hex to ASCII conversion doesn't seem to work (ugly characters).
Do you know of some nice algorithm or tool (Ruby) to do that?
A UUID is a 128-bit binary number, in the end. If you represent it as 16 unencoded bytes, there's no way to avoid "ugly characters". What you probably want to do is decode it from hex and then encode it using base64. Note that base64 encoding uses the characters + / = as well as A-Za-z0-9, you'll want to do a little postprocessing (I suggest s/+/-/g; s/\//_/g; s/==$// -- a base64ed UUID will always end with two equals signs)

MAPI: Format of PR_SEARCH_KEY

Does anyone know the format of the MAPI property PR_SEARCH_KEY?
The online documentation has this to say about it:
The search key is formed by
concatenating the address type (in
uppercase characters), the colon
character ':', the e-mail address in
canonical form, and the terminating
null character.
And the exchange document MS-OXOABK says this:
The PidTagSearchKey property of type
PtypBinary is a binary value formed by
concatenating the ASCII string "EX: "
followed by the DN for the object
converted to all upper case, followed
by a zero byte value.
However all the MAPI messages I've seen with this property have it as some sort of binary 16 byte sequence that looks like a GUID. Does anyone else have any more information about it? Is it always 16 bytes?
Thanks!
I believe that the property PR_SEARCH_KEY will be of different formats for different objects (as alluded to by Moishe).
A MAPI message object will have a unique value assigned on creation for PR_SEARCH_KEY, however if the object is copied this property value is copied also. I presume when you reply to an e-mail, Exchange will assign the PR_SEARCH_KEY value to be the original message's value.
You will need to inspect each object type to understand how the PR_SEARCH_KEY is formed but I doubt if it's always 16 bytes for all MAPI types.
This link USENET discussion has a good discussion with Dmitry Streblechenko involved who is an expert on Extended MAPI.
The sentence before the ones you quoted from the online docs reads, "MAPI uses specific rules for constructing search keys for message recipients" which makes me think that it's talking about the PR_SEARCH_KEY property on MAPI_MAILUSER objects -- or at least not on MAPI_MESSAGE objects.

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