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Essential SNMP
book

Essential SNMP

by Douglas Mauro, Kevin Schmidt
July 2001
Intermediate to advanced
336 pages
10h 50m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Essential SNMP

Is My Device SNMP-Compatible?

Your product documentation should be helpful in determining hardware or software compatibility with SNMP. You can also consult your sales representative, or customer support, if applicable. Another way to tell if a product is SNMP-compatible is to perform an snmpget query against the device in question.[12] Issuing a diagnostic get against any device is easy. The most common way to accomplish this is to find a Unix host that has the snmpget binary command installed.[13] There are several varieties of this command, so consult your manpage or system administrator for help. The easiest variable to query for is sysDescr, which provides a description of the system being queried. Here’s what happens when you use the Net-SNMP snmpget command to look at sysDescr on a typical Linux host:

$ snmpget linuxserver.ora.com public system.sysDescr.0
system.sysDescr.0 = "Linux version 2.0.34 (root@porky.redhat.com) 
(gcc version 2.7.2.3) #1 Fri May 8 16:05:57 EDT 1998"

The response from linuxserver.ora.com is typical of most managed devices. Note, however, that there’s nothing sacred about the actual description; the text you retrieve will vary from vendor to vendor. Issuing an snmpget against a Cisco 2503 router should return something like this:

$ snmpget orarouter.ora.com public system.sysDescr.0 system.sysDescr.0 = "Cisco Internetwork Operating System Software ..IOS (tm) 2500 Software (C2500-I-L), Version 11.2(5), RELEASE SOFTWARE (fc1)..Copyright (c) 1986-1997 ...
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596000200Catalog PageErrata