Motorola Netopia Embedded Software, Handbook

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9-10 Administrator’s Handbook
1. Select System Name and enter a descriptive name for the Router’s SNMP agent.
2. Select System Location and enter the gateway’s physical location (room, floor, building, etc.).
3. Select System Contact and enter the name of the person responsible for maintaining the gateway.
4. The Notification Type pop-up menu allows you to configure the type of SNMP notifications that will be
generated:
v1 Trap – This selection will generate notifications containing an SNMPv1 Trap Protocol Data Unit (PDU)
v2 Trap – This selection will generate notifications containing an SNMPv2 Trap PDU. SNMP-V2c is a more
feature-rich version, but is not suppor ted by all vendors. Consult with your ser vice provider.
Inform – This selection will generate notifications containing an SNMPv2 InformRequest PDU.
System Name, System Location, and System Contact set the values returned by the Router SNMP agent for the
SysName, SysLocation, and SysContact objects, respectively, in the MIB II system group. Although optional, the
information you enter in these items can help a system administrator manage the network more efficiently.
Community strings
The Read-Only Community String and the Read/Write Community String are like passwords that must be used
by an SNMP manager quer ying or configuring the Motorola Netopia® Embedded Software Version 8.7.4. An
SNMP manager using the
Read-Only Community String can examine statistics and configuration information
from the gateway, but cannot modify the gateway’s configuration. An SNMP manager using the Read/Write
Community String can both examine and modify configuration parameters.
By default, the read-only and read/write community strings are set to public and private, respectively. You
should change both of the default community strings to values known only to you and trusted system adminis-
trators.
To change a community string, select it and enter a new value.
Setting the Read-Only and Read-Write community strings to the empty string will block all SNMP requests to the
gateway. (The gateway may still send SNMP Traps if those are properly enabled.)
Previously, if either community string was the empty string, SNMP Requests specifying an empty community
string were accepted and processed.
This change is designed to allow the administrator to block SNMP access to the gateway and to provide more
granular control over the allowed SNMP operations to the gateway.
•
Setting only the Read-Write community string to the empty string will block SNMP Set Requests to the
gateway, but Get Requests and Get-Next Requests will still be honored using the Read-Only community
string (assuming that is not the empty string).
•
Setting only the Read-Only community string to the empty string will not block Get Requests or Get-Next
Requests since those operations (and Set Requests) are still allowed using the (non-empty) Read-Write
community string.
Even if you decide not to use SNMP, you should change the community strings. This prevents unauthorized
access to the Router through SNMP. For more information on security issues, see
“Suggested Security
Measures” on page 10-1 .