Essential SNMP, 2nd Edition

Agent Configuration Walkthroughs

In the following sections, we will walk through the configurations of some typical SNMP agents. We have chosen devices that are found on almost every modern network (PCs, Unix servers, routers, UPSs, etc.). The point of this discussion isn't to show you how your particular agent is configured—that would not be practical, given the hundreds of devices and vendors out there. Our intent is to give you a feel for what the common options are, and what steps you'll typically go through to configure an agent.

Windows Agents (Net-SNMP)

Microsoft makes an SNMP agent for its operating systems. Unfortunately, it's not exactly the most feature-rich agent in the world. In this section, we'll install the Net-SNMP agent on Windows. The nice thing about this agent is that it's free. For those of you who need the support of a commercial product, take a look at Concord's SNMP agent; it's covered later in this chapter.

The Net-SNMP agent is available from http://net-snmp.sourceforge.net. We discuss the Net-SNMP agent for Windows in this section, and the nice thing about this is that both environments share the same configuration settings. Review the section about the Unix agent later in this chapter for details on advanced configurations.

We should point out some differences between the Windows version and the Unix version of the agent. If we wait until the end of this section, they might not catch your attention as easily:

• The version that you download from the Internet ...