Re: (no subject)

Juergen Schoenwaelder (schoenw@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de)
Fri, 10 Nov 1995 21:12:32 +0100

Hi!

John Banghart <john@success.net> said:

John> Being new to SNMP, I am sure this is a simple question. I
John> have managed to get the SNMP stuff working with Scotty/Tkined
John> but in order to do it, I had to allow anyone to read the info
John> off the host. Where can I specify what community my
John> workstation is part of so that I can limit reading to me
John> alone?

There are two things to do: You first have to configure your SNMP
agents to use a community string other than public or private. This is
agent specific and I can't help you here.

Now, lets see how Scotty/Tkined handle non-standard community strings:
Scotty uses the -community session configuration option to set the
community string (see the scotty(1) for more details). Your first
option to use arbitrary community strings with Tkined is to change the
default by using the "Set Parameter" dialog provided by each SNMP
tool. However, this can get annoying soon because the default is not
saved automatically. So your second option is to add a line like

snmp.community: foobar

to your tkined.defaults file. This will define a default community
string.

You can also define community strings for each single Tkined object by
definining an attribute SNMP:Config which holds a string with the
options understood by scotty to build the SNMP session. For a node
with address 1.2.3.4, you could set the SNMP:Config attribute to

-community foobar -address 134.169.246.1

You usually do not want to hard code your community string in the
Tkined maps as you will have to change them manually. Therefore, you
can make use of the alias mechanism. You can define aliases in a
startup file (e.g. $scotty_library/site/init.tcl or ~/.scottyrc) like

snmp alias local -community foobar

You can now use the alias "local" as an argument to the -alias session
configuration option. To continue the example above, you would set the
SNMP:Config attribute to

-alias local -address 1.2.3.4

This indirection allows you to change the community settings for all
your hosts by changing one line in the scotty initialization file. I
know, there should be a more user friendly dialog to simplify these
things...

Juergen