“‘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…”