SNMP- changing public community name on HP Procurve J4121A

[Tim Howley]

For security reasons we are disabling all unnecessary SNMP traffic. When I telnetted into our HP Procurve J4121A switch (4000M) the help file said that disabling or changing the community name "public" would, among other things, cause "VLAN configuration capabilities (to be) lost".

My question is will this affect the functioning of the switch. My understanding of SNMP at least on servers is that it is mainly a passive reporting system on system health. We are using only the default VLAN and we will not be adding any more or changing this. Does this just mean that we will not be able to make changes to our VLAN or that our present VLAN config will be lost? The former we can deal with. Thanks.

[Ron Kinner · Accepted solution]

Tim,

I'm not a Procurve expert but it sounds like HP has some means of configuring the switch using the SNMP set command. Perhaps a separate VLAN Control Package. If you disable this then it can't make changes that way.

Anyway. since you only have the default VLAN 1 which doesn't use any tagging anyway and is always going to be there, there is no danger that disabling SNMP will cause the switch not to work.

Ron

[Maurice Skubski]

VLAN does not use SNMP for configuration. Also they will never use the "puplic" community to execute SNMP set commands. This is a really big security isue! ;)