Overview 27916SNMP CONFIGURATIONOverview The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) has gained the most extensiveapplication in the computer networks. SNMP has been put into use and widelyaccepted as an industry standard in practice. It is used for ensuring thetransmission of the management information between any two nodes. In this way,network administrators can easily search and modify the information on any nodeon the network. In the meantime, they can locate faults promptly and implementthe fault diagnosis, capacity planning and report generating. SNMP adopts thepolling mechanism and provides the most basic function set. It is most applicableto the small-sized, fast-speed and low-cost environment. It only requires theunverified transport layer protocol UDP; and is thus widely supported by manyother products.In terms of structure, SNMP can be divided into two parts, namely, NetworkManagement Station and Agent. Network Management Station is the workstationfor running the client program. At present, the commonly used NM platformsinclude Sun NetManager and IBM NetView. Agent is the server software operatedon network devices. Network Management Station can send GetRequest,GetNextRequest and SetRequest messages to the Agent. Upon receiving therequests from the Network Management Station, Agent will perform Read orWrite operation according to the message types, generate and return theResponse message to Network Management Station. On the other hand, Agentwill send Trap message on its own initiative to the Network Management Stationto report the events whenever the device encounters any abnormalities such asnew device found and restart.SNMP Versions andSupported MIBTo uniquely identify the management variables of a device in SNMP messages,SNMP adopts the hierarchical naming scheme to identify the managed objects. Itis like a tree. A tree node represents a managed object, as shown in the figurebelow. Thus the object can be identified with the unique path starting from theroot.
