SNMP, WBEM protocols...

[Albert Austin]

Most of the protocols in the Discovery settings are new to me. I have read a bit about what they are about, but when it comes to configuring them Im a bit lost. The User guide doesnt have much information about this. COuld someone tell me more about what community names means and is it safe if my SIM server accepts packets from any hosts?

[Mikael Rönnbäck]

Here's a bit info from our experience.

WBEM, best left unused, since if using it and SNMP together you get duplicated data in the reports, for example disks will show up twice and CDs will appear as full disks (well, technically they are, but I really don't want to see them, I only want to see "real" disk volumes)

SNMP, is what we use, old fashioned, hardly no security at all but reliable. You need to configure the so-called community strings, which is more or less a password.
The HP agents will not be happy if the "Public" community is completely removed, but setting it to read-only works fine. Then you add another read-write string (if you want to be able to for example mark errors as corrected and so on)
SNMP is clear text, so safety is not its strongest point, there are a number of 3rd party SNMP implementations, I have not tried them, as there is another option, you can set accepted hosts, meaning only the hosts you specify are allowed to send snmp requests to the specified server. A good idea is to enable this and only allow localhost (127.0.0.1) and the SIM server to use the SNMP protocol to the target servers.

If you wish to use SNMP I also recommend setting the properties for Contact, Location, and Traps, the first are freetext, the Traps setting is just the IP adress to your SIM server, i.e. where the server should send its traps to.

Regarding "accept SNMP traps from any host" on the actual SIM servers, I am not entirely sure here so someone else may have to answer this one better than me.

DMI, default is enabled, and I've really just left it that way, if any of our discovered nodes should want to talk DMI ;-)

Hope this helps anything.

[Albert Austin]

Thanks a lot mikael! It does help clear the issue up a lot more.