Changes affecting MIB Smithy:

• A “wrong # args” error could occur when previewing a single OBJECT-TYPE in SMI format (the error did not occur when previewing the whole module).

Changes affecting both MIB Smithy and MIB Smithy SDK:

• The “piberrors” type in the XML-SMI Schema document was not correct and did not match the implementation and has been corrected.
• Newlines and carriage returns in OCTET STRING values were forcing conversion to hex (such as in varbind values in responses) as if they were on-printable characters.
• A crash could occur if the environment variable for pointing to the license key file were mistakenly set to a directory instead.

There was another issue with the table SEQUENCE definition relocation change merged into 4.0.4 and not fixed in 4.0.5 that caused them to be generated twice rather than once. This could cause a module that was saved to fail to load back into MIB Smithy later.

Also, when such failure occurred due to the duplicate definition, double-clicking on the error in the compiler log should have opened the text file editor for manual correction, but instead caused an “invalid workspace type” error.

Both of these issues have been corrected in the 4.0.6 release.

I’ve made some changes to the feed structure for the blog to be more flexible and a little more standard.

While I expect all posts will be categorized under either “News” or “Articles” (with additional categories as appropriate), you’ll notice that the categories listed for posts now have feed icons next to them, which you can use to subscribe to more specific categories. The “News+Articles” feed is still the feed for the full blog.

If you’re already subscribed to a feed, you may wish to resubscribe as paths have been changed (e.g. the “News” feed is now “/blog/category/news/feed/” instead of “/news_feed.php”). Redirects are in place so your subscription should continue to operate as before even if you don’t, but resubscribing will reduce the number of requests your client needs to send.

My apologies if this causes any trouble. The dust is still settling a bit on the new systems.

The change for grouping table SEQUENCE definitions with the table and entry OBJECT-TYPEs made in 4.0.4 was not completely merged into the 4.0.x branch. As a result, a “wrong # args” error could occur when generating or saving modules in SMI format. The problem has been corrected in this patch release.

As mentioned in the new site announcement, there were some compatibility issues with MSIE6. Mainly these were due to the new CSS for the site making heavy use of + (adjacent sibling), > (child) and li:hover selectors, which are not supported by MSIE6 and resulted in some things looking like a Salvador Dali painting and drop-down menus not… dropping down. The known issues should now be resolved, after some unfortunate (but necessary) liberal use of additional tag attributes and a little bit of javascript to activate the drop-downs under MSIE versions earlier than 7.

I had hoped to avoid such workarounds for broken browsers: I was happy to finally drop workarounds for Netscape 4 that were in the previous site design! Plus, there were no machines here still running MSIE6 anymore, and I’d imagine you can’t have MSIE6 and MSIE7 running on the same machine. VMware Workstation, which I use for building and testing MIB Smithy and other Muonics products under multiple platforms from a single machine, came to the rescue here.

After deploying the site, however, I heard some reports and checked our site statistics, where I saw that about 30% of visitors are still using MSIE6–surprisingly high for such a broken browser, but I understand some people may not meet the minimum OS version requirements of MSIE7 yet. For what it’s worth, the site was tested with current versions of MSIE, FireFox and Opera browsers, all of which have sufficient standards support for the earlier CSS to work, and even Lynx to make sure it’s usable (even if it could still stand some improvement for accessibility).

If you notice any other issues, do let me know and I’ll get them fixed them ASAP. Otherwise, I believe there’s just minor nit-picky adjustments to be made, and parts of the redesign that are still under way (such as some new features). Thanks!

Michael Kirkham, President & CEO