Using SNMPv3 with Net-SNMP

The latest version of SNMP, version 3, is still not that common yet, and it is somewhat more complex than the previous versions. Device implementations can also vary in quality, so it might be useful to test your configuration of Zabbix against a known solution—Net-SNMP daemon. Let's add an SNMPv3 user to it and get a value. Make sure Net-SNMP is installed and that snmpd starts up successfully.

To configure SNMPv3, first stop snmpd, and then, as root, run this:

# net-snmp-create-v3-user -ro zabbix

This utility will prompt for a password. Enter a password of at least eight characters—although shorter passwords will be accepted here, it will fail the default length requirement later. Start snmpd again, and test the retrieval of values using v 3:

$ snmpget -u zabbix -A zabbixzabbix -v 3 -l authNoPriv localhost SNMPv2-MIB::sysDescr.0  

This should return data successfully, as follows:

SNMPv2-MIB::sysDescr.0 = STRING: Linux another 3.11.10-29-default #1 SMP Thu Mar 5 16:24:00 UTC 2015 (338c513) x86_64  

We don't need to configure versions 1 or 2c separately, so now we have a general SNMP agent, providing all common versions for testing or exploring.