[mrtg] Re: SNMP V3 Support

[Simon Leinen]

Woo, Rebekah (Contractor) writes:
>> I am new to mrtg, and I searched the internet to see if mrtg
>> supports SNMP V3, but I couldn't find the answer.
>> 
>> Can someone please let me know if mrtg supports SNMP V3?  I see
>> that the latest version of mrtg includes snmp_session 1.05, but I
>> can't find what the snmp_session 1.05 supports...

SNMP_Session only supports SNMPv1 and (community-based) SNMPv2
("SNMPv2c").

There are no plans to add SNMPv3 support to SNMP_Session.  I'd
recommend looking at Net::SNMP, which has been supporting SNMPv3 for
quite a while.  A nice project would be to write a variant of
SNMP_util.pm that sits on top of Net::SNMP rather than SNMP_Session.
Since MRTG uses the SNMP_util layer, that should make it work with
SNMPv3.

However, since SNMPv3 doesn't have communities, something creative
would have to be done about the syntax of SNMP targets (currently
"community at host[:options]").  Probably one should look at the proposed
SNMP URI syntax
(http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-black-snmp-uri-08.txt -
NOTE that this may still change).

Anther issue with SNMPv3 is that it uses engine IDs, which are usually
"discovered" using a well-defined discovery mechanism.  It would be
good to cache discovered engine IDs somewhere, to avoid repeating the
discovery process for every round of MRTG.  If MRTG is run from cron
every five minutes, then such an engine ID cache should be written to
disk between runs.  I'm not sure whether Net::SNMP already supports
this.  If MRTG is run as a long-running "daemon" process, making the
cache persistent might not be necessary.
-- 
Simon.

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