SNMP

[indianya]

If an external application running on HOST-A invokes snmpget command on HOST-B, is there a log maintained on HOST-B that can be used to check whether snmpget failed or succeeded?

How can a sys admin troubleshoot whether HOST-B receives snmpget properly?

[Jaime Bolanos Rojas.]

indianya,

Usually in HP-UX snmpget error messages are logged into the syslog.log

Regards,

Jaime

[indianya]

Jaime,

Thank you for replying. I already checked but I do not have any messages related to SNMP in syslog.log

[Mel Burslan]

ps -ef | grep snmpd

do you something running with -l option ?
if not, you are not logging snmp traffic. Since snmp chatter can be a bit too much, unless you are working on aproblem, I'd suggest not using the -l option but for this troubleshooting effort, you can kill the daemon and restart with -l option and see what's going on. Once finished, you might want to kill it again and start without logging enabled.

Hope this helps

[Emil Velez · Accepted solution]

on 11.31 there is a logfile

other option you can turn on nettl and trace port 161 and 162.

[Matti_Kurkela]

SNMP is based on UDP protocol, which does not include any mechanism for acknowledging received messages. It works on "best-effort, no guarantees" basis. As far as I know, SNMP does not implement any acknowledge mechanisms on top of the basic UDP - after all, it is "Simple".

So, if HOST-A sends a query to HOST-B and HOST-B responds to it, HOST-B only knows if the answer was sent or not: there is no way for it to know if the answer reached HOST-A or not.

It is the responsibility of HOST-A to retry the query if it did not receive the answer, or to report an error if repeated retries won't help.

MK