SNMP read only, read/write

[Robert Durenkamp]

Hello,

For SNMP you need a read only community and a read/write community. Why is this ?? How does HP SIM use both ??

Works fine by the way.

Anyone ??

Thanks !

[David Claypool]

HP SIM in fact only needs a read community string; there are no activities for which it performs a write using SNMP. This means that you can establish a read-only community string and make it the only one that traverses the wire.

While HP SIM may not need read-write, the agents themselves use SNMP locally to communicate among themselves. You may have seen questions here in the forum about getting an errroneous "out of disk space" error when trying to deploy software using VCA. This comes about frequently when there is no read-write community string available for VCA to talk to the Insight agent with.

Best practice is to establish a read-only and a read-write community string at each server. Since HP SIM only needs the read-only, your read-write string will never traverse the wire, offering a modicum of additional security by not allowing the read-write string to be compromised by sniffing the wire.