CCDA 640-864 Official Cert Guide - Chapter 15 Summary

Simple Network Management Protocol

Overview and basic concepts

In typical SNMP uses, one or more administrative computers, called managers, have the task of monitoring or managing a group of hosts or devices on a computer network. Each managed system executes, at all times, a software component called an agent which reports information via SNMP to the manager.

Essentially, SNMP agents expose management data on the managed systems as variables. The protocol also permits active management tasks, such as modifying and applying a new configuration through remote modification of these variables. The variables accessible via SNMP are organized in hierarchies. These hierarchies, and other metadata (such as type and description of the variable), are described by Management Information Bases (MIBs).

An SNMP-managed network consists of three key components:

Managed device

Agent — software which runs on managed devices

Network management system (NMS) — software which runs on the manager

A managed device is a network node that implements an SNMP interface that allows unidirectional (read-only) or bidirectional access to node-specific information. Managed devices exchange node-specific information with the NMSs. Sometimes called network elements, the managed devices can be any type of device, including, but not limited to, routers, access servers, switches, bridges, hubs, IP telephones, IP video cameras, computer hosts, and printers.

An agent is a network-management software module that resides on a managed device. An agent has local knowledge of management information and translates that information to or from an SNMP specific form.

A network management system (NMS) executes applications that monitor and control managed devices. NMSs provide the bulk of the processing and memory resources required for network management. One or more NMSs may exist on any managed network.

Management information base (MIB)

Main article: Management information base

SNMP itself does not define which information (which variables) a managed system should offer. Rather, SNMP uses an extensible design, where the available information is defined by management information bases (MIBs). MIBs describe the structure of the management data of a device subsystem; they use a hierarchical namespace containing object identifiers (OID). Each OID identifies a variable that can be read or set via SNMP. MIBs use the notation defined by ASN.1.

Protocol details

SNMP operates in the Application Layer of the Internet Protocol Suite (Layer 7 of the OSI model). The SNMP agent receives requests on UDP port 161. The manager may send requests from any available source port to port 161 in the agent. The agent response will be sent back to the source port on the manager. The manager receives notifications (Traps and InformRequests) on port 162. The agent may generate notifications from any available port. When used with Transport Layer Security or Datagram Transport Layer Security requests are received on port 10161 and traps are sent to port 10162.

SNMPv1 specifies five core protocol data units (PDUs). Two other PDUs, GetBulkRequest and InformRequest were added in SNMPv2 and carried over to SNMPv3.

All SNMP PDUs are constructed as follows:

IP header         UDP header    version community      PDU-type        request-id        error-status      error-index            variable bindings

The seven SNMP protocol data units (PDUs) are as follows:

GetRequest

A manager-to-agent request to retrieve the value of a variable or list of variables. Desired variables are specified in variable bindings (values are not used). Retrieval of the specified variable values is to be done as an atomic operation by the agent. A Response with current values is returned.

SetRequest

A manager-to-agent request to change the value of a variable or list of variables. Variable bindings are specified in the body of the request. Changes to all specified variables are to be made as an atomic operation by the agent. A Response with (current) new values for the variables is returned.

GetNextRequest

A manager-to-agent request to discover available variables and their values. Returns a Response with variable binding for the lexicographically next variable in the MIB. The entire MIB of an agent can be walked by iterative application of GetNextRequest starting at OID 0. Rows of a table can be read by specifying column OIDs in the variable bindings of the request.

GetBulkRequest

Optimized version of GetNextRequest. A manager-to-agent request for multiple iterations of GetNextRequest. Returns a Response with multiple variable bindings walked from the variable binding or bindings in the request. PDU specific non-repeaters and max-repetitions fields are used to control response behavior. GetBulkRequest was introduced in SNMPv2.

Response

Returns variable bindings and acknowledgement from agent to manager for GetRequest, SetRequest, GetNextRequest, GetBulkRequest and InformRequest. Error reporting is provided by error-status and error-index fields. Although it was used as a response to both gets and sets, this PDU was called GetResponse in SNMPv1.

Trap

Asynchronous notification from agent to manager. Includes current sysUpTime value, an OID identifying the type of trap and optional variable bindings. Destination addressing for traps is determined in an application-specific manner typically through trap configuration variables in the MIB. The format of the trap message was changed in SNMPv2 and the PDU was renamed SNMPv2-Trap.

InformRequest

Acknowledged asynchronous notification manager to manager or agent to manager. Manager-to-manager notifications were already possible in SNMPv1 (using a Trap), but as SNMP commonly runs over UDP where delivery is not assured and dropped packets are not reported, delivery of a Trap was not guaranteed. InformRequest fixes this by sending back an acknowledgement on receipt. Receiver replies with Response parroting all information in the InformRequest. This PDU was introduced in SNMPv2.

Version 1

SNMP version 1 (SNMPv1) is the initial implementation of the SNMP protocol. SNMPv1 operates over protocols such as User Datagram Protocol (UDP), Internet Protocol (IP), OSI Connectionless Network Service (CLNS), AppleTalk Datagram-Delivery Protocol (DDP), and Novell Internet Packet Exchange (IPX). SNMPv1 is widely used and is the de facto network-management protocol in the Internet community.

The first RFCs for SNMP, now known as SNMPv1, appeared in 1988:

RFC 1065 — Structure and identification of management information for TCP/IP-based internets

RFC 1066 — Management information base for network management of TCP/IP-based internets

RFC 1067 — A simple network management protocol

These protocols were obsoleted by:

RFC 1155 — Structure and identification of management information for TCP/IP-based internets

RFC 1156 — Management information base for network management of TCP/IP-based internets

RFC 1157 — A simple network management protocol

After a short time, RFC 1156 (MIB-1) was replaced by more often used:

RFC 1213 — Version 2 of management information base (MIB-2) for network management of TCP/IP-based internets

Version 1 has been criticized for its poor security. Authentication of clients is performed only by a "community string", in effect a type of password, which is transmitted in cleartext. The '80s design of SNMP V1 was done by a group of collaborators who viewed the officially sponsored OSI/IETF/NSF (National Science Foundation) effort (HEMS/CMIS/CMIP) as both unimplementable in the computing platforms of the time as well as potentially unworkable. SNMP was approved based on a belief that it was an interim protocol needed for taking steps towards large scale deployment of the Internet and its commercialization. In that time period Internet-standard authentication/security was both a dream and discouraged by focused protocol design groups.

Version 2

SNMPv2 (RFC 1441–RFC 1452), revises version 1 and includes improvements in the areas of performance, security, confidentiality, and manager-to-manager communications. It introduced GetBulkRequest, an alternative to iterative GetNextRequests for retrieving large amounts of management data in a single request. However, the new party-based security system in SNMPv2, viewed by many as overly complex, was not widely accepted.

Community-Based Simple Network Management Protocol version 2, or SNMPv2c, is defined in RFC 1901–RFC 1908. In its initial stages, this was also informally known as SNMPv1.5. SNMPv2c comprises SNMPv2 without the controversial new SNMP v2 security model, using instead the simple community-based security scheme of SNMPv1. While officially only a "Draft Standard", this is widely considered the de facto SNMPv2 standard.

User-Based Simple Network Management Protocol version 2, or SNMPv2u, is defined in RFC 1909–RFC 1910. This is a compromise that attempts to offer greater security than SNMPv1, but without incurring the high complexity of SNMPv2. A variant of this was commercialized as SNMP v2*, and the mechanism was eventually adopted as one of two security frameworks in SNMP v3.

SNMPv1 & SNMPv2c interoperability

As presently specified, SNMPv2 is incompatible with SNMPv1 in two key areas: message formats and protocol operations. SNMPv2c messages use different header and protocol data unit (PDU) formats from SNMPv1 messages. SNMPv2c also uses two protocol operations that are not specified in SNMPv1. Furthermore, RFC 2576 defines two possible SNMPv1/v2c coexistence strategies: proxy agents and bilingual network-management systems.

Proxy agents

A SNMPv2 agent can act as a proxy agent on behalf of SNMPv1 managed devices, as follows:

A SNMPv2 NMS issues a command intended for a SNMPv1 agent.

The NMS sends the SNMP message to the SNMPv2 proxy agent.

The proxy agent forwards Get, GetNext, and Set messages to the SNMPv1 agent unchanged.

GetBulk messages are converted by the proxy agent to GetNext messages and then are forwarded to the SNMPv1 agent.

The proxy agent maps SNMPv1 trap messages to SNMPv2 trap messages and then forwards them to the NMS.

Bilingual network-management system

Bilingual SNMPv2 network-management systems support both SNMPv1 and SNMPv2. To support this dual-management environment, a management application in the bilingual NMS must contact an agent. The NMS then examines information stored in a local database to determine whether the agent supports SNMPv1 or SNMPv2. Based on the information in the database, the NMS communicates with the agent using the appropriate version of SNMP.

Version 3

Although SNMPv3 makes no changes to the protocol aside from the addition of cryptographic security, its developers have managed to make things look much different by introducing new textual conventions, concepts, and terminology.

SNMPv3 primarily added security and remote configuration enhancements to SNMP.

Security has been the biggest weakness of SNMP since the beginning. Authentication in SNMP Versions 1 and 2 amounts to nothing more than a password (community string) sent in clear text between a manager and agent. Each SNMPv3 message contains security parameters which are encoded as an octet string. The meaning of these security parameters depends on the security model being used.

SNMPv3 provides important security features:

Confidentiality - Encryption of packets to prevent snooping by an unauthorized source.

Integrity - Message integrity to ensure that a packet has not been tampered with in transit including an optional packet replay protection mechanism.

Authentication - to verify that the message is from a valid source.

As of 2004 the IETF recognizes Simple Network Management Protocol version 3 as defined by RFC 3411–RFC 3418 (also known as STD0062) as the current standard version of SNMP. The IETF has designated SNMPv3 a full Internet standard, the highest maturity level for an RFC. It considers earlier versions to be obsolete (designating them "Historic").

In practice, SNMP implementations often support multiple versions: typically SNMPv1, SNMPv2c, and SNMPv3.

RMON

An RMON implementation typically operates in a client/server model. Monitoring devices (commonly called "probes" in this context) contain RMON software agents that collect information and analyze packets. These probes act as servers and the Network Management applications that communicate with them act as clients. While both agent configuration and data collection use SNMP, RMON is designed to operate differently than other SNMP-based systems:

Probes have more responsibility for data collection and processing, which reduces SNMP traffic and the processing load of the clients.

Information is only transmitted to the management application when required, instead of continuous polling.

In short, RMON is designed for "flow-based" monitoring, while SNMP is often used for "device-based" management. RMON is similar to other flow-based monitoring technologies such as NetFlow and SFlow because the data collected deals mainly with traffic patterns rather than the status of individual devices. One disadvantage of this system is that remote devices shoulder more of the management burden, and require more resources to do so. Some devices balance this trade-off by implementing only a subset of the RMON MIB groups (see below). A minimal RMON agent implementation could support only statistics, history, alarm, and event.

The RMON1 MIB consists of ten groups:

• Statistics: real-time LAN statistics e.g. utilization, collisions, CRC errors
• History: history of selected statistics
• Alarm: definitions for RMON SNMP traps to be sent when statistics exceed defined thresholds
• Hosts: host specific LAN statistics e.g. bytes sent/received, frames sent/received
• Hosts top N: record of N most active connections over a given time period
• Matrix: the sent-received traffic matrix between systems
• Filter: defines packet data patterns of interest e.g. MAC address or TCP port
• Capture: collect and forward packets matching the Filter
• Event: send alerts (SNMP traps) for the Alarm group

The RMON2 MIB adds ten more groups:

• Protocol Directory: list of protocols the probe can monitor
• Protocol Distribution: traffic statistics for each protocol
• Address Map: maps network-layer (IP) to MAC-layer addresses
• Network-Layer Host: layer 3 traffic statistics, per each host
• Network-Layer Matrix: layer 3 traffic statistics, per source/destination pairs of hosts
• Application-Layer Host: traffic statistics by application protocol, per host
• Application-Layer Matrix: traffic statistics by application protocol, per source/destination pairs of hosts
• User History: periodic samples of user-specified variables
• Probe Configuration: remote configure of probes
• RMON Conformance: requirements for RMON2 MIB conformance

NetFlow

NetFlow is a network protocol developed by Cisco Systems for collecting IP traffic information. NetFlow has become an industry standard for traffic monitoring and is supported by platforms other than Cisco IOS and NXOS such as Juniper routers, Enterasys Switches, vNetworking in version 5 of vSphere, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.

Network Flows

Main article: Packet flow

A network flow has been defined in many ways. The traditional Cisco definition is to use a 7-tuple key, where a flow is defined as a unidirectional sequence of packets all sharing all of the following 7 values:

• Source IP address
• Destination IP address
• Source port for UDP or TCP, 0 for other protocols
• Destination port for UDP or TCP, type and code for ICMP, or 0 for other protocols
• IP protocol
• Ingress interface (SNMP ifIndex)
• IP Type of Service

  

CDP

The Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) is a proprietary Data Link Layer network protocol developed by Cisco Systems. It is used to share information about other directly connected Cisco equipment, such as the operating system version and IP address. CDP can also be used for On-Demand Routing, which is a method of including routing information in CDP announcements so that dynamic routing protocols do not need to be used in simple network.

Syslog

Syslog is a standard for computer data logging. It allows separation of the software that generates messages from the system that stores them and the software that reports and analyzes them.

Syslog can be used for computer system management and security auditing as well as generalized informational, analysis, and debugging messages. It is supported by a wide variety of devices (like printers and routers) and receivers across multiple platforms. Because of this, syslog can be used to integrate log data from many different types of systems into a central repository.

Messages refer to a facility (auth, authpriv, daemon, cron, ftp, lpr, kern, mail, news, syslog, user, uucp, local0, ... , local7 ) and are assigned a severity (Emergency, Alert, Critical, Error, Warning, Notice, Info or Debug) by the sender of the message.

Configuration allows directing messages to various local devices (console), files (/var/log/) or remote syslog daemons. Care must be taken when updating the configuration as omitting or misdirecting message facilities or severities can cause important messages to be ignored by syslog or overlooked by the administrator.

logger is a command line utility that can send messages to the syslog.

Some implementations permit the filtering and display of syslog messages.

Syslog is now standardized within the Syslog working group of the IETF.