Product specifications

Chapter 6. SNMP Option
67
May 2011
6.2.5 SNMP Communities
To enable the delimitation of management domains, SNMP uses "communities". Each
community is identified by a name, which is an alphanumeric string of up to 255 characters defined
by the user. Any SNMP entity (this term includes both managed nodes and management stations) is
assigned by its user a community name. In parallel, the user defines for each SNMP entity a list of
the communities which are authorized to communicate with it, and the access rights associated with
each community (this is the SNMP community name table of the entity).
In general, SNMP agents support two types of access rights:
Read-only the SNMP agent accepts and processes only SNMP getRequest
and getNextRequest commands from management stations
which have a read-only community name.
Read-write the SNMP agent accepts and processes all the SNMP
commands received from a management station with a read-write
community name. SNMP agents are usually configured to send
traps to management stations having read-write communities.