Monitoring Linux Hosts with SNMP
Last month’s column introduced the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and described how SNMP can be used to monitor devices and hosts connected to your network. This month, we’ll configure a Linux machine as an SNMP agent and learn how to keep SNMP secure.
Saturday, June 15th, 2002
Last month’s column introduced the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and described how SNMP can be used to monitor devices and hosts connected to your network. This month, we’ll configure a Linux machine as an SNMP agent and learn how to keep SNMP secure.
Configuring Net-SNMP
Net-SNMP (http://www.net-snmp.org/), formerly known as UCD-SNMP, is the preferred SNMP package for Linux. Net-SNMP includes the snmpd daemon, an agent for Linux hosts, and a suite of client utilities. Net-SNMP does not include a manager (remember that an SNMP manager is the central monitor and the SNMP agent is the client); you’ll need to separately acquire SNMP management software if you want to talk to the Net-SNMP agent software.
The snmpd daemon is started via the /etc/init.d/snmp boot script and uses /usr/share/snmp/snmpd.conf as its default configuration file. (Be aware that the RPMs provided with recent SuSE distributions use the /etc/ucdsnmpd.conf configuration file instead, although you can change this by editing the boot script.) Figure One shows a sample Net-SNMP snmpd.conf file.
Figure One: Sample snmpd.conf file |
