You need to obtain the following information from a network administrator before you install the SNMP service on your computer:
The following sections discuss each of these items.
A community is a group of hosts to which a Windows NT computer running the SNMP service belongs. Communities are identified by a community name. The use of a community name provides primitive security and context checking for SNMP agents and management systems.
You can specify one or more communities to which the Windows NT computer using SNMP will send traps. The community name is placed in the SNMP packet when the trap is sent.
An SNMP agent won't accept a request from a management system outside the community. When the SNMP agent receives a request for information that does not contain the correct community name or does not match an accepted host name for the service, the SNMP agent can send a trap to the trap destination(s), indicating that the request failed authentication. Whether the SNMP agent sends a trap for failed authentication depends upon what you configured for SNMP security.
In the following example, there are two communities — Public and Engineering.
Only the agents and managers that are members of the same community can communicate with each other.
Trap destinations are the names, IP addresses, or IPX addresses of hosts to which you want the SNMP service to send traps with the selected community name. The traps SNMP sends depend on its configuration information, and can include events such as system startup, system shutdown, or password violation.
Before you install the SNMP service, make sure you have the host names, IP addresses, or IPX addresses of hosts to which your system will send SNMP traps or from which your system will receive SNMP requests.