How do I receive SNMP traps on OS X?

Question

I need to receive and parse some SNMP traps (messages) and I would appreciate any advice on getting the code I have working on my OS X machine. I have been given some Java code that runs on Windows with net-snmp. I'd like to either get the Java code running on my development machine or whip up some Python code to do the same.

I was able to get the Java code to compile on my OS X machine and it runs without any complaints, including none of the exceptions I would expect to be thrown if it was unable to bind to socket 8255. However, it never reports receiving any SNMP traps, which makes me wonder whether it's really able to read on the socket. Here's what I gather to be the code from the Java program that binds to the socket:

DatagramChannel dgChannel1=DatagramChannel.open();
Selector mux=Selector.open();
dgChannel1.socket().bind(new InetSocketAddress(8255));
dgChannel1.configureBlocking(false);
dgChannel1.register(mux,SelectionKey.OP_READ);
while(mux.select()>0) {
    Iterator keyIt = mux.selectedKeys().iterator();
    while (keyIt.hasNext()) {
        SelectionKey key = (SelectionKey) keyIt.next();
        if (key.isReadable()) {
            /* processing */
        }
    }
}

Since I don't know Java and like to mess around with Python, I installed libsnmp via easy_install and tried to get that working. The sample programs traplistener.py and trapsender.py have no problem talking to each other but if I run traplistener.py waiting for my own SNMP signals I again fail to receive anything. I should note that I had to run the python programs via sudo in order to have permission to access the sockets. Running the java program via sudo had no effect.

All this makes me suspect that both programs are having problem with OS X and its sockets, perhaps their permissions. For instance, I had to change the permissions on the /dev/bpf devices for Wireshark to work. Another thought is that it has something to do with my machine having multiple network adapters enabled, including eth0 (ethernet, where I see the trap messages thanks to Wireshark) and eth1 (wifi). Could this be the problem?

As you can see, I know very little about sockets or SNMP, so any help is much appreciated!

Update: Using lsof (sudo lsof -i -n -P to be exact) it appears that my problem is that the java program is only listen on IPv6 when the trap sender is using IPv4. I've tried disabling IPv6 (sudo ip6 -x) and telling java to use IPv4 (java -jar bridge.jar -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true) but I keep finding my program using IPv6. Any thoughts?

java      16444          peter   34u  IPv6 0x12f3ad98      0t0    UDP *:8255

Update 2: Ok, I guess I had the java parameter order wrong: java -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true -jar bridge.jar puts the program on IPv4. However, my program still shows no signs of receiving the packets that I know are there.

Answer 1

The standard port number for SNMP traps is 162.

Is there a reason you're specifying a different port number ? You can normally change the port number that traps are sent on/received on, but obviously both ends have to agree. So I'm wondering if this is your problem.

Answer 2

Ok, the solution to get my code working was to run the program as java -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true -jar bridge.jar and to power cycle the SNMP trap sender. Thanks for your help, Brian.