Essential SNMP, 2nd Edition

Profiles for Different Users

Some users may have specific ways in which they want to use NNM. For example, an operator who is watching the network for problems may need a fairly limited set of menus and tools; a senior network engineer might want a substantially larger set of options. You can use the $OV_REGISTRATION directory and the $OVwRegDir environment variable to customize NNM on a per-user basis.

The previous section showed how to add menus by modifying files in the $OV_REGISTRATION/C directory. By default, this is the directory NNM uses when it starts. However, you can create as many profiles as you need under the $OV_REGISTRATION directory. Once you have created another profile directory, you can change the $OVwRegDir environment variable to point to that new directory. Then, when NNM starts, it will use the new profile.

One way to set up user-specific profiles is to create an account that anyone can use for starting an NNM session. With this account, the network map is opened in read-only^[†] mode and has only the minimal menus (File → Exit, Map → Refresh, Fault → Alarms, etc.). Create a new profile for this account in the directory $OV_REGISTRATION/skel by copying all the files in the default profile $OV_REGISTRATION/C to the new skel directory. Then modify this profile by removing most of the menu choices, thus preventing the operator from being able to run any external commands.^[‡] To start NNM using this profile, you must point the $OVwRegDir environment variable to the ...