SNMP Communities reset to default for no reason

[Matt Goswell_1]

We have two SNMP communities within our organisation: One for reading (tsg-public), one for writing (tsg-private). Simple... except at random intervals (an hour, two hours, half a day) the SNMP communities that are configured get "reset" back to 'public' and 'private'. I added two more communities to test with (Insight and Public) and these entries always remain the same. As you can imagine, every time the community gets reset, all our devices start appearing as Unmanaged and the cluster alerts go mental!!!

Q1. Can HP-SIM handle '-'s in the community name?

This was all working fine on HP-SIM 4.1. We upgraded to 4.2 and noticed the issue. I have just completed the upgrade to HP-SIM 5 (SP4) and the issue is still here.

Q2. Does a Database table exist that contains what the SNMP community strings are so I can write a script to ensure the entries remain the same? Or a file?

Please help. The next stage is to rebuild our management server and I must ensure that we have tried everything before I present this option to my manager.

Thanks in advance to anyone who has seen this or who has any info which can help me out.

[tmagee]

Not seen your issue before, but regards your first question, I have a '-' in the read community string without issues (had this from SIM 4.1 to current SIM 5, no SP).

[Mike Angley]

About 6 weeks ago, running 5.0 SP2 i saw the same behaviour. Reset itself to defaults. After i reset it, it lasted about 1 week then did it again. Then it lasted only 2 days. About that time i installed SP3 and that destroyed SIM to unrepairable status, so i ended up rebuilding the entire server. Have been running 5.0 SP3 since and no issues with it resetting.
I would look at the DB, especially if it is local to the SIM server. That was my biggest issue, eating away every spare MB of disk space. Since i have rebuilt i moved the DB to a SQL server and have no more issues with the Database.

[Matt Goswell_1]

OK, for anyone who is remotely interested, I have sussed out the issue and the files which are causing the problem... and I am pleased to say I have had this running now for 5 days without a community string reverting!! Hurrah!! :O)

So, what did I do? Navigate to:

"C:\Program Files\HP\Systems Insight Manager\config"

The files you need to edit are:

globalsettings.props
globalsettings.tpl
globalsettingsupd.tpl

Replace the community entries with the correct ones and save the file(s). All files MUST have the Archive attribute set and READ-ONLY turned ON! System, Administrators and Network Service should be assigned R, W, C access. Domain Admins or a privileged local account (other than Administrator) can be granted Full Control to the files. The account which HP-SIM uses to start with should ONLY have READ ONLY rights against these three files. If you need to add new communities, do it by editing the files directly and not use the GUI. I believe the GUI is the cause of the problem. I also suggest taking a copy of the files in case something nasty goes wrong when you're editing..... - A space or trailing full stop(.) will stop these files from being interpreted and the HP SIM service will start WITHOUT the communities you specified, resulting in all systems becoming UNMANAGED.

Thanks to all who replied. I hope this may assist you in the future if you come across this issue again.

[Matt Goswell_1]

See my previous entry. I hope that anyone else who has encountered this issue can sleep at night now should it happen again! :O)