A.3.1 Net-SNMP Configuration

Messaging Server's Net-SNMP based SNMP subagent uses the AgentX protocol to communicate with the platform's SNMP master agent (RFC 2741). The Net-SNMP master agent, snmpd, must be configured to permit the use of the AgentX protocol. To do this, ensure that the platform's snmpd.conf file contains the line

master agentx

If that line is not present, then add it and then restart the snmpd daemon. Note that sending a SIGHUP signal to the daemon is not sufficient. Once the snmpd daemon has been restarted, look for the UNIX domain socket which snmpd creates for AgentX communications. On Solaris and Linux systems, this socket by default appears as the special file /var/agentx/master; however, its location and name may be changed via the snmpd.confile.

The Solaris 10 OS snmpd configuration is show below:

%cp /etc/sma/snmp/snmpd.conf /etc/sma/snmp/snmpd.conf.save
% cat >> /etc/sma/snmp/snmpd.conf
# Messaging Server's subagent requires the AgentX protocol
master agentx
^D
% cat >> /etc/sma/snmp/snmpd.conf
% ls -al /var/agentx/
srwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Aug 9 13:58 /var/agentx/master

Additionally, on Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 3 systems, the default snmpd.conf file restricts the information which may be viewed by the "public" SNMP community. It is therefore necessary to either remove that restriction or to extend it to include the MIBs served out by Messaging Server's subagent. For initial testing, doing the latter is recommended. This is accomplished by including the OID subtrees mib-2.27 and mib-2.28 in view named "systemview" as shown in below. For actual deployment, each site must take their overall security policy into consideration. Note that the information provided by the SNMP subagent is "read only".

% cp /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf.save
% cat >>/etc/snmp/snmpd.conf
# Messaging Server's subagent requires the AgentX protocol
master agentx
# Messaging Server's subagent exports mib-2.27 and .28
# Add the mib-2.27 and .28 OID subtrees to the systemview
view systemview included .1.3.6.1.2.1.27
view systemview included .1.3.6.1.2.1.28
^D
% /sbin/service snmpd restart
% ls -al /var/agentx/master
srwxr-xr-x 1 root root 0 Aug 8 21:20 /var/agentx/master

If you will be using SNMP v3 context names to distinguish between the MIBs of different instances of Messaging Server concurrently running on the same host computer, then you will also need to configure at least one SNMP v3 username and password for use with your SNMP v3 queries.