I was importing MIBs into MIB Tools and had some questions on the directories where MIBs are located. What MIb files does Spectrum use within MIB Tools exactly?
Release : All Supported Versions
The flat-file MIBs exist for importing into MIB Tools but once imported, MIB-Tools access a mysql database, not the flat-files directly.
The guides have some details on the directories in question.
1. contrib directory is the OOB provided MIBs
2. Dependent sub-directory is for storing MIBs which are dependent on others. the root dir contains the same mibs as /contrib/Dependent
3. scripts - just contains scripts, like bulkCompile.sh
4. userContrib - any MIBs you download and import are stored here. Any imported custom mibs which need dependent MIBs will also be copied to userContrib/Dependent
When importing a custom downloaded MIB from /userContrib, it does not copy the MIB file over to /contrib. Only the internal MibDatabase will contain both the OOB and Custom MIBs already imported/compiled.
Note that once a MIB gets imported, it is placed into the MySQL table 'mibtools' where MIB-Tools will access. So, even if the flat file were to end up missing for some reason, the actual MIB which Spectrum uses internally is stored in MySQL.