SNMP communities

In SNMP version 1 and version 2 (SNMPv1 and SNMPv2), administration groups are known as communities. SNMP communities consist of one agent and one or more SNMP managers. You can assign groups of hosts to SNMP communities for limited security checking of agents and management systems or for administrative purposes. Defining communities provides security by allowing only management systems and agents within the same community to communicate.

Communities are identified by community names that you assign. A host can belong to multiple communities at the same time, but an agent does not accept a request from a management system outside its list of acceptable community names. All GET and SET requests from an SNMP manager to an agent need to specify the community name of which the SNMP manager is a member so that the agent can perform access permission checking.

The dtx.acl file, located in the IBM Transformation Extender installation directory, identifies the SNMP communities to the SNMP Agent.

There is no relationship between community names and domain or workgroup names. Community names represent a shared password for groups of network hosts, and should be selected and changed as you would change any password. Deciding which hosts belong to the same community is generally determined by physical proximity.