Essential SNMP: Help for System and Network Administrators

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) provides a "simple" set of operations that allows you to more easily monitor and manage network devices like routers, switches, servers, printers, and more. The information you can monitor with SNMP is wide-ranging--from standard items, like the amount of traffic flowing into an interface, to far more esoteric items, like the air temperature inside a router. In spite of its name, though, SNMP is not especially simple to learn.

O'Reilly has answered the call for help with a practical introduction that shows how to install, configure, and manage SNMP. Written for network and system administrators, the book introduces the basics of SNMP and then offers a technical background on how to use it effectively. Essential SNMP explores both commercial and open source packages, and elements like OIDs, MIBs, community strings, and traps are covered in depth. The book contains five new chapters and various updates throughout. Other new topics include:

• Expanded coverage of SNMPv1, SNMPv2, and SNMPv3
• Expanded coverage of SNMPc
• The concepts behind network management and change management
• RRDTool and Cricket
• The use of scripts for a variety of tasks
• How Java can be used to create SNMP applications
• Net-SNMP's Perl module

The bulk of the book is devoted to discussing, with real examples, how to use SNMP for system and network administration tasks. Administrators will come away with ideas for writing scripts to help them manage their networks, create managed objects, and extend the operation of SNMP agents.

Once demystified, SNMP is much more accessible. If you're looking for a way to more easily manage your network, look no further than Essential SNMP, 2nd Edition.

Douglas Mauro received a bachelor's degree at the University of Albany, New York, and worked as a system administrator for several years before becoming a project engineer with Sun Microsystems, Inc. In addition to his consulting duties with Sun, he authors their internal OneStop Sun Management Center page and has published several InfoDocs with them.

Kevin J. Schmidt currently lives in Lilburn, Georgia. He is a senior software developer at SecureWorks, Inc. (http://www.secureworks.com), where he is lead developer for the comapny's SIM platform. He also leading the development of the company's log analysis service line. Prior to SecureWorks, Kevin was a senior Java/C developer at Reflex Security (http://www.reflexsecurity.com). And prior to Reflex, Kevin spent four years at GuardedNet, Inc. (http://www.micromuse.com/sols/dom_man/sec_man.html) as a senior software developer and team lead.

Kevin's experience with network management began in 1995 while working at a regional ISP in Pensacola, Florida. In 1996 he moved to Atlanta, Georgia to work for MindSpring Enterprises (now known as Earthlink), a national ISP. He spent four years in network management and was the senior network management architect for Earthlink. He left Earthlink to work at Netrail, a tier-1 Internet backbone provider. While at Netrail, Kevin was in charge of the company's network management architecture.