SNMP Questions

Note: If you are not sure about SNMP, please read our Simple Network Management Protocol SNMP Tutorial.

Question 1

Explanation

The command “show snmp user” displays information about the configured characteristics of SNMP users. The following example specifies the username as abcd with authentication method of MD5 and encryption method of 3DES.

Reference: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/ios/12_4t/12_4t2/snmpv3ae.html

Note: The command “show snmp group” displays the names of groups on the router and the security model, the status of the different views, and the storage type of each group. Below is an example of this command.

Reference: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/datacenter/sw/5_x/nx-os/system_management/configuration/guide/sm_nx_os_cg/sm_9snmp.html

Question 2

Explanation

The syntax of configuring a SNMP community string is:

snmp-server community string [ view view-name ] [ ro | rw ] [ access-list-number ]

By default, the community string permits read-only (ro) access to all objects. Therefore the first command in the exhibit above means “allow a SNMP manager that matches access-list 1 and use the password “ciscotest” to have Read-Only access to this device.

But the question mentioned that the network operations cannot read or write configuration to this device so there are two issues with above SNMP statement:
+ Maybe ACL 1 did not match the IP address of the network operations so we have to modify ACL 1 to “permit” the operations subnet.
+ This SNMP configuration only allows Read-Only permission so we have to configure the rw permission by adding the “rw” keyword after the community string (but before the ACL number).