13.7. Summary

This chapter has given you a taste of what SNMP can do. You have installed, configured, and started the Net-SNMP agent on your own computer. You have explored what SNMP can tell you about a networked machine using the snmpget, snmpwalk, and snmptable commands provided by Net-SNMP. You have modified one of the settings on your system (sysName) with SNMP. You have also sent and received some traps. Except for the brief probes of a wireless access point and networked printer, we have limited ourselves to the local machine so that even readers not currently on a network can still have some fun exploring.

We have also limited our tools to those which come with the Net-SNMP package. The nice thing about standard protocols is that software from multiple sources can interoperate. You might try taking a look at a MIB browser from another source. MIB browsers walk a MIB for you and give you a graphical view of the MIB tree offered by the target system. You can find one such browser at http://www.mibble.org.