snmp_config - describes how to configure the ucd-snmp
applications.
DESCRIPTION
The ucd-snmp package uses various configuration files to
configure its applications. This manual page merely
describes the overall nature of them, so that the other
manual pages don't have to.
DIRECTORIES SEARCHED
First off, there are numerous places that configuration
files can be found and read from. By default, the appli
cations look for configuration files in the following 3
directories, in order: /etc/snmp, /usr/lib/snmp, and
$HOME/.snmp. In each of these directories, it looks for
files with the extension of both .conf and default places
a configuration file can exist for any given configuration
file type.
Additionally, the above default search path can be over
ridden by setting the environment variable SNMPCONFPATH to
a ':' separated list of directories to search for.
Finally, applications that store persistent data will also
look in the /var/snmp directory for configuration files
there.
CONFIGURATION FILE TYPES
Each application may use multiple configuration files,
which will configure various different aspects of the
application. For instance, the SNMP agent (snmpd) knows
how to understand configuration directives in both the
snmpd.conf and the snmp.conf files. In fact, most appli
cations understand how to read the contents of the
snmp.conf files. Note, however, that configuration direc
tives understood in one file may not be understood in
another file. For further information, read the associ
ated manual page with each configuration file type. Also,
most of the applications support a '-H' switch on the com
mand line that will list the configuration files it will
look for and the directives in each one that it under
stands.
The snmp.conf configuration file is intended to be a
application suite wide configuration file that supports
directives that are useful for controlling the fundamental
nature of all of the snmp applications, such as how they
all manipulate and parse the textual SNMP mib files.
SWITCHING CONFIGURATION TYPES IN MID-FILE
It's possible to switch in mid-file the configuration type
that the parser is supposed to be reading. Since that
sentence doesn't make much sense, lets give you an
output for the agent by default, but you didn't want to do
that for the rest of the applications (ie, snmpget, snmp
walk, you'd need to put a line like:
dumpPacket true
into the snmp.conf file. But, this would turn it on for
all of the applications. So, instead, you can put the
same line in the snmpd.conf file so that it only applies
to the snmpd demon. However, you need to tell the parser
to expect this line. You do this by putting a special
type specification token inside a [] set. In other words,
inside your snmpd.conf file you could put the above
snmp.conf directive by adding a line like so:
[snmp] dumpPacket true
This tells the parser to parse the above line as if it
were inside a snmp.conf file instead of an snmpd.conf
file. If you want to parse a bunch of lines rather than
just one then you can make the context switch apply to the
remainder of the file or until the next context switch
directive by putting the special token on a line by
itself:
# make this file handle snmp.conf tokens:
[snmp]
dumpPacket true
logTimestamp true
# return to our original snmpd.conf tokens:
[snmpd]
rocommunity mypublic
COMMENTS
Any lines beginning with the character '#' in the configu
ration files are treated as a comment and are not parsed.
API INTERFACE
Information about writing C code that makes use of this
system in either the agent's mib modules or in applica
tions can be found in the read_config(3) manual page.
SEE ALSO
read_config(3).
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