Technicolor - Thomson SpeedTouchTM620 Basic Concepts, Management Information Base Basic Commands

Chapter 10

SpeedTouch™ Monitoring

10.1.1 Basic Concepts

Management Information Base

Basic Commands

The Management Information Base, or MIB, is a tree-like structure containing SNMP objects, instances of these objects and their corresponding values. Parts of this tree have been standardized, other parts may be specific to a device.

For the SpeedTouch™ a set of MIBs is provided on the Setup CD, some being identical to the standard MIBs, others specifically made for the SpeedTouch™ .

The available data covers statistics of the traffic through an interface, errors and setup information. For details of what information is available consult the MIB definitions at “10.1.2 MIBs Explained.” on page 136.

SNMP has two basic commands:

Get: gets the value of a specific parameter in a specific MIB.

Set: sets the value of a specific parameter in a specific MIB.

Traps Traps are SNMP notification messages sent from the SpeedTouch™ to a manager. It is possible to configure where the traps are sent and which traps are sent.

Community Names Reading MIBs is harmless. However, some MIBs also contain sensitive security parameters. Reading these parameters (get) may provide the user with information he should not have access to.

Writing to a MIB (set) can have severe consequences. Therefore, as a security measure, it is not possible to set any behavior changing objects using SNMP.

Furthermore, SNMP offers a possibility to restrict access to the SNMP MIBs by means of SNMP ‘Community Names’.

To have specific kinds of access to the SNMP MIBs, the SNMP manager has to know the correct Community Name. A Community Name serves as password and authentication. On agent-side, a community name is associated with a specific MIB- view (which MIB objects can be seen by a manager using that community name) and an access policy (read-only or read-write).

By default, the SpeedTouch™ uses the default SNMP Community name for read only (public). For read/write, no community name is assigned. It is recommended however that the user should change the default community names in a way to improve security.

In a saved configuration file (user.ini, etc.) the Community names are encrypted to ensure confidentiality.

Simultaneous SNMP The SpeedTouch™ simultaneously supports SNMP V1, V2 and V3. This means that Version Support it can handle messages from all three versions. The system forwards the message to the appropriate subsystem based on the version indicator in the SNMP message.

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