ITEM: AT9626

NetView - Turning off SNMP to limit discovery

Question:

   I have a problem getting my map setup as I would like it.  We have a
link off campus to a library provider.  Their hub is a DEC DECNIS-600.
I want to have this device managed so I can see if the library link is
up but I don't want to see the whole internal network at the provider.
I thought I could get this by highlighting the DECNIS and selecting
"Edit" and then "Modify/Describe" ... "Object...", then "General
Attributes" and making "isSNMPSupported" false.  This works for a while,
but then NV decides that the device can do SNMP and changes it back (and
my map growns by an order of magnitude :-).

Answer:Turning off SNMP may not be the best way to limit discovery.

If you want make NetView/6000 unable to get SNMP information from
a given node, you should change the community name, either on the
node itself, or just change NetView's value for it on the
the SNMP Configuration screen (accessible through Options..SNMP
Configuration).  For instance, if the community name is "public",
change it on the SNMP Config screen to, say, "bogus".

But this is usually a bad idea, for a couple of reasons.  First, if
you disable SNMP on a node, then it will be harder for netmon to
learn about configuration changes on that node.  In addition,
if you disable SNMP, netmon might find out about the IP address
you don't want to discover from other sources, so you might not
acheive your objective of limiting discovery.

There are two much better ways of limiting discovery.

The first is to use a netmon seed file.  When you use a seed file, you
can tell netmon to limit discovery to IP addresses that exist in
a given set of ranges.  This has the effect of preventing netmon
from discovering IP addresses that exist outside these ranges.

The other way to limit discovery is to unmanage the networks that
you are not interested in.  Once you unmange the network, you just
manage the node that you are interested in (the DEC machine), and
you should be OK.




Support Line: NetView - Turning off SNMP to limit discovery ITEM: AT9626

Dated: January 1996 Category: N/A

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