Net-SNMP is a suite of software for using and deploying the

SNMP Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is an Internet Standard protocol for collecting and organizing information about managed devices on IP networks and for modifying that information to change device behaviour. Devices that typically ...

protocol (v1, v2c and v3 and the AgentX subagent protocol). It supports

IPv4 Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) is the fourth version of the Internet Protocol (IP). It is one of the core protocols of standards-based internetworking methods in the Internet and other packet-switched networks. IPv4 was the first version d ...

IPv6 Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet. I ...

, IPX, AAL5, Unix domain sockets and other transports. It contains a generic client

library A library is a collection of materials, books or media that are accessible for use and not just for display purposes. A library provides physical (hard copies) or digital access (soft copies) materials, and may be a physical location or a vi ...

, a suite of

command line A command-line interpreter or command-line processor uses a command-line interface (CLI) to receive commands from a user in the form of lines of text. This provides a means of setting parameters for the environment, invoking executables and pro ...

applications, a highly extensible SNMP agent,

perl Perl is a family of two High-level programming language, high-level, General-purpose programming language, general-purpose, Interpreter (computing), interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it ...

modules and python modules.

Distribution

Net-SNMP is housed on

SourceForge SourceForge is a web service that offers software consumers a centralized online location to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software. It provides source code repository hosting, bug tracking, mirrori ...

and is usually in the top 100 projects in the SourceForge ranking system. It was the March 2005 SourceForge Project of the Month. It is very widely distributed and comes included with many operating systems including most distributions of

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

OpenBSD OpenBSD is a security-focused operating system, security-focused, free and open-source, Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Theo de Raadt created OpenBSD in 1995 by fork (software development), forking N ...

, Solaris, and

OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

. It is also available from the Net-SNMP web site.

History

Steve Waldbusser of CMU started a freely available SNMP tool kit in 1992. The package was later abandoned by CMU and Wes Hardaker at

UC Davis The University of California, Davis (UC Davis, UCD, or Davis) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university near Davis, California. Named a Public Ivy, it is the northernmost of the ten campuses of the Uni ...

renamed it to UCD-SNMP and extended it to meet the network management needs of the Electrical Engineering department there. Eventually Mr. Hardaker left the university and realized that the project was now network wide and thus renamed it to Net-SNMP to reflect its distributed development.Net-SNMP History
/ref> The roots of the Net-SNMP project are long and a full description can be found on th

page.

SNMP Applications Included With Net-SNMP

Snmpget

The command ''snmpget'' uses the snmpget application to retrieve information associated with a specific object identifier (OID) from a target device.

Example

An example of ''snmpget'' usage (this will retrieve a specific OID 'sysUpTime' under the community string 'demopublic', with 'test.net-snmp.org' as the host name of the agent to query:

Snmpwalk

The command ''snmpwalk'' uses the SNMP GETNEXT request to query a network for a tree of information. An object identifier (OID) may be given on the command line. This OID specifies which portion of the object identifier space will be searched using GETNEXT requests. All variables in the subtree below the given OID are queried and their values presented to the user. If no OID argument is present, snmpwalk will search the subtree rooted at SNMPv2-SMI::mib-2 (including any MIB object values from other MIB modules, that are defined as lying within this subtree).

Example

An example of ''snmpwalk'' usage (this will retrieve all of the variables under the ''system'' OID):

References

{{Reflist

Application layer protocols Internet protocols Internet Standards Multi-agent systems Software using the BSD license System administration Free network management software Internet Protocol based network software