My situation is that my company makes a product that (currently) requires the user to set up a dozen or so VLANs on a managed switch that is dedicated to the exclusive use with our product.
Currently, the way it works is this: The user enters his system-configuration preferences into a proprietary (Qt-based) GUI that we provide, and when he's done the GUI spits out a "VLAN configuration report" indicating what VLANs need to be set up, and which Ethernet ports should be members of which VLANs. The user is then responsible for using the switch's Web interface to manually enter those settings into the switch.
This "sort of" works, but requiring the user to enter all of that data is both tedious and error-prone, so we'd like to somehow automate the process: that is, have our program connect to the managed switch directly and tell the switch what VLANs to set up and what ports to assign to them.
What is the best way to do this? Is this something that can be accomplished using SNMP? If so, where do I look to start implementing such a function? (I'm fairly experienced with basic TCP/IP programming, but I don't know where to start with SNMP.)
Best Answer
RFC2674 might help. This would be a non-trivial implementation, but less vendor specific than other possible solutions. It defines the Q-BRIDGE-MIB which allows for changing VLANs via SNMP.