3Com CoreBuilder 3500, Implementation Manual

Page: 538 / 592

538 C
HAPTER
18: D
EVICE
M
ONITORING
Security
SNMP uses community strings as a form of management security. To
enable management communication, the manager must use the same
community strings that are configured on the agent. You can define both
read and read/write community strings.
Because community strings are included unencoded in the header of a
User Datagram Protocol (UDP) packet, packet capture tools can easily
access this information. As with any password, change the community
strings frequently.
Setting Up SNMP on
Your System
To manage your system from an external management application, you
must configure SNMP community strings and set up trap reporting, as
described in this section.
You must also assign an IP address to either the system processor
out-of-band Ethernet port or an in-band Ethernet port, depending on
where the management station is attached. See Chapter 2 for more
information.
You can manage the system using an SNMP-based external management
application. This application (called the SNMP manager) sends requests to
the system, where they are processed by the internal SNMP agent.
You can gain access to the Remote Monitoring (RMON) capabilities of
your system through SNMP applications such as Transcend
®
Network
Control Services software. See “RMON in Your System” later in this
chapter for information about the RMON capabilities of your system.
The SNMP agent provides access to the collection of information about
your system. (You can view many system-specific settings.) Your views of
MIB information differ depending on the system SNMP management
method that you choose.
In addition, you can configure a system SNMP agent to send traps to an
SNMP manager to report significant events.
Access to system information through SNMP is controlled by community
strings.