RE: [Isms] #1: is it important to support anonymous user access toSNMP?

["David B Harrington" <dbharrington at comcast.net>]

Hi,

> Consider a public facility (maybe a library) that has free
> network access. Consider management applications that could
> be used to determine the availability of some resource
> (such as a printer). In this situation, it would be
> impractical to give each user a unique identity so
> that they could use SNMP to determine the status
> of the printers. If the identities of the printers
> were not authenticated (or the communication not
> integrity checked) then someone could fake that
> a printer was unavailable so that they could
> have exclusive access.

The much simpler approach is to give the printer-monitoring
application installed on the public computers its own credentials -
the application is mapped to a securityName, and the application is
allowed to see specific portions of the SNMP data. 

Human users have anonymous access to the application, which has access
to the SNMP data and would presumably interpret the data and display
the interpretation in a form suitable for human consumption.

The users do not need anonymous access to SNMP, and the application
doesn't need to be anonymous either.

David Harrington
dbharrington at comcast.net




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