Ubuntu has the image of a user-friendly distribution, good for grandparents and human beings in general. It is also an excellent choice for any kind of infrastructure and servers in datacenters. In fact, according to W3Tech, Ubuntu server is right now in the third position and growing fast as a webserver.
In a previous article I looked at installing a basic network router using RCP100 on a Ubuntu 12.04 computer. Today, I will take a look at using Ubuntu for some more serious SNMP work.
The main SNMP software package available under Linux is net-snmp. Installation and usage is described in plenty of articles on Internet. The package is very powerful, however it operates strictly on the command line. In the day to day work, a GUI based SNMP MIB Browser would be nice.
One such MIB Browser I come to enjoy is iREASONING MIB Browser. It is a commercial product, however the company is kind enough to provide a limited personal edition free of charge. It is a Java-based browser, and it will work on any operating system where Java is available. On Ubuntu, this means you will need to install Java Runtime Environment:
$ sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jre
Download mibbrowser.zip from iREASONING website and unzip it:
$ cd ~
$ unzip Downloads/mibbrowser.zip
This will create a ~/ireasoning/mibbrowaser directory in your home directory. To start the browser, cd into mibrowser directory and run browser.sh script:
$ cd ireasoning/mibbrowser/
$ ./browser.sh
Type in the IP address of the device you want to browse, press Advanced button and set the community string, and you are ready to grab the SNMP information.
