
Configuring SNMP, RMON, BOOTP, DHCP, and RARP Services
2-4 114070 Rev. B
SNMP Communities
For security reasons, the SNMP agent validates each request from an SNMP
manager before responding to the request, by verifying that the manager belongs
to a valid SNMP community.
An SNMP community is a logical relationship between an SNMP agent and one
or more SNMP managers. You define communities locally at the agent. The agent
establishes one community for each desired combination of authentication and
access control characteristics. You assign each community a unique name (within
the agent), and all members of a community have the same access privileges,
either read-only or read-write:
• Read-only: members can view configuration and performance information
• Read-write: members can view configuration and performance information,
and also change the configuration
By defining a community, an agent limits access to its MIB to a selected set of
management stations. By using more than one community, the agent can provide
different levels of MIB access to different management stations.
All SNMP message exchanges consist of a community name and a data field,
which contains the SNMP operation and its associated operands. You can
configure the SNMP agent to receive requests and send responses only from
managers that are members of a known community.
If the agent knows the community name in the SNMP message and knows that the
manager generating the request is a member of that community, it considers the
message to be authentic and gives it the access allowed for members of that
community. Thus, the SNMP community prevents unauthorized managers from
viewing or changing the configuration of a router.
SNMP Implementation Notes
This section contains information about features specific to the Bay Networks
implementation of SNMP.
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