Administrators of networks with SNMP management systems can precisely control the access rights to various access levels. SNMP does this by encoding the access credentials as part of a so-called "community". Authentication is optionally handled
- by the 'public' community (unlimited SNMP read access),
- by a master password (limited SNMP read access), or
- a combination of user name and password, separated by a colon (limited SNMP read access)
. By default, your device answers all SNMP requests that it receives from LANmonitor or another SNMP management system with the community 'public'. Because this represents a potential security risk, especially with external access, LANconfig gives you the option of disabling the 'public' community and/or defining your own community under .
Prohibiting unauthorized read access
In order to enable authentication for SNMP read access, you must deactivate the community 'public'. You can do this by enabling the option SNMP read-only community 'public' disabled. This setting only allows information about the state of the device, current connections, reports, etc., to be read out via SNMP after the user authenticates at the device. Authorization can be conducted either with the administrator-account access credentials or an access account created for the custom SNMP community.
Specifying a custom SNMP community for read-only access
You can define your own community in the SNMP read-only community field. Either specify a master password or a username:password pair. Leave the field blank if you do not wish to operate any other read-only community except for 'public' (assuming the latter is enabled).