"'Simple Network Management Protocol' is a relative term. To the uninitiated, raw SNMP output, along with arcane technobabble like 'MIB' and 'ASN.1,' looks a little daunting. Developing some understanding of how to parse and filter SNMP information doesn't take long, though, and can put you on a fast track to making SNMP bend to your whim.
"The first thing to know about SNMP is that it is a service that is structured such that an SNMP agent sitting on a target host can be queried by remote hosts for various bits of information. Only the target host (the one you want information about) needs to be running an SNMP daemon. The client making the queries just needs some tool capable of making SNMP queries and parsing the output. Most Linux server and client tools are supplied by the Net-SNMP project. A quick poke around your system to locate snmpwalk or snmpget should let you know in short order if you have the client tools installed. The server daemon is called, predictably, snmpd..."
