AIX SNMP Defaults

[harikiri () ATTRITION ORG (harikiri)]

Following on from Michael Zalewski's recent SNMP post, here's an issue i
noted on two AIX systems.

NOTE: This was seen on both AIX 4.3 and 4.2.

It appears that on the above releases of AIX, the SNMP daemon is enabled
by default and two community names are enabled with read/write privileges.
The community names are "private" and "system", but are only allowed from
localhost connections. Nevertheless, a local user may install an SNMP
client, and modify sensitive variables.

Excerpt from /etc/snmpd.conf:

        <snip>

        # 2. Set the community names and access privileges for hosts that can make
        #    requests of this snmpd agent.  Define these restrictions as follows:
        #
        #       community  <name>  <address>  <netmask>  <permissions> <view name>

        <snip>

        community       public
        community       private 127.0.0.1 255.255.255.255 readWrite
        community       system  127.0.0.1 255.255.255.255 readWrite 1.17.2

harikiri