Administrator Guide

Implementation Information
The Dell Networking OS supports SNMP version 1 as defined by RFC 1155, 1157, and 1212, SNMP version 2c as
defined by RFC 1901.
Configuring the Simple Network
Management Protocol
NOTE
: The configurations in this chapter use a UNIX environment with net-snmp version 5.4. This is only
one of many RFC-compliant SNMP utilities you can use to manage the Aggregator using SNMP. Also,
these configurations use SNMP version 2c.
Configuring SNMP version 1 or version 2 requires only a single step:
1 Create a community.
NOTE: IOA supports only Read-only mode.
Important Points to Remember
• Typically, 5-second timeout and 3-second retry values on an SNMP server are sufficient for both local
area network (LAN) and wide area network (WAN) applications. If you experience a timeout with these
values, increase the timeout value to greater than 3 seconds, and increase the retry value to greater than
2 seconds on your SNMP server.
Setting up SNMP
Dell Networking OS supports SNMP version 1 and version 2 which are community-based security models. The
primary difference between the two versions is that version 2 supports two additional protocol operations
(informs operation and snmpgetbulk query) and one additional object (counter64 object).
Creating a Community
For SNMPv1 and SNMPv2, create a community to enable the community-based security in the Dell
Networking OS.
The management station generates requests to either retrieve or alter the value of a management object and
is called the SNMP manager. A network element that processes SNMP requests is called an SNMP agent. An
SNMP community is a group of SNMP agents and managers that are allowed to interact. Communities are
necessary to secure communication between SNMP managers and agents; SNMP agents do not respond to
requests from management stations that are not part of the community.
Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) 840