Essential SNMP
By Douglas Mauro, Kevin Schmidt
1st Edition July 2001
ISBN: 0-596-00020-0
326 pages, $39.95 US, $59.95 CA, £28.50 UK
All I knew about SNMP was that SNMP could tell you stuff about your network. That sounded like a cool thing, but every time I had tried to grok SNMP on the web, I had learned that the Simple Network Management Protocol is not Simple at all.
Then the auditor told us that SNMP was a security risk to our network, rattling of strange jibberish like "community strings," "public/private," and "mibs." So I curled up with Essential SNMP over a weekend and promptly became competent. This book will get you up to speed in SNMP in a jiffy. It is exactly what it claims to be—the essentials of SNMP. Those essentials are probably everything you need to know to start making SNMP work for you in your network.
This book is a little aged; it was published in 2001. (I'm writing this in mid-2005) Luckily, SNMP hasn't changed much since then. Most devices you will find in your existing network probably don't even support SNMPv3, and some probably only support SNMPv1. The book does explain all three versions well.
SNMP may not have changed much, but the tools have changed slightly. For example, none of the Net-SNMP examples will work with recent releases. However, the idea of what you can do is still important, and translating from the book's examples to current syntax is simple enough once you learn what has changed in syntax since 2001. (Hint: RTFM) There is a chapter on MRTG, which is useful, but if it were written today they might have chosen Cacti instead. I can only hope that OpenView has become more administrator-friendly since this book was written.
Book Organization
Chapters 1-3 cover the basics of SNMP. They are by far the most valuable chapters. By the time you finish them you should understand what SNMP is good for, what it can do for you, and why you need to be careful with SNMP devices on your network. Graciously, O'Reilly has put chapter 2—the meatiest chapter of this trio—online for all to read.
The remainder of the chapters go into great detail on how to configure your NMSes, agents, and everything else SNMP. The spotlighted NMSes are Net-SNMP, HP OpenView, and Castle Rock's SNMPc. Many other SNMP softwares are covered lightly in appropriate places. More importantly, I think, is that the nooks and crannies of SNMP itself are explored. You can learn how to grok MIBs, build your own MIBs and how to write your own agents or NMSes in Perl (with a spattering of examples). That chapter on MRTG also lies in this section.
The appendices cover various topics in more detail and provide a nice reference for things like which RFCs to read for more information.
You will consume this book quickly, because you will skim over much of the details in the latter portion of the book. Especially if you can't afford OpenView. When you're done, you'll go on a network management rampage, not resting until you've set up all the cool SNMP stuff you can find, e.g. Cacti, Net-SNMP, and whatever cool commercial NMS trial versions you can get your hands on. And you'll have fun doing it.