Administrators of networks with SNMP management systems can precisely control the access rights to various access levels. SNMP of the versions v1 and v2 do this by encoding the access credentials as part of a "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 define your own communities under and clicking SNMP settings and SNMP communities.
For SNMPv1 or SNMPv2c, you force the entry of login data for SNMP read-only access by disabling the public community in the list of the SNMP communities. 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 individual SNMP community.
Disabling the community public has no effect on accessing for other communities created here. An individual SNMP read-only community always provides an alternative access path that is not tied to an administrator account.
