Simple Network Management Protocol

A Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) Agent is software that acts as an intermediary to receive SNMP requests and distribute them to the protocol stack. An SNMP Agent also relays replies from the protocol stack to a console utility. To provide information about the AppleTalk network, Novell's SNMP Agent, SNMP.NLM, communicates with the AppleTalk stack and router, contained in APPLETLK.NLM.

For remote access to network management information, SNMP.NLM uses either the Datagram Delivery Protocol (DDP), the Internetwork Packet Exchange^TM (IPX^TM) protocol, or the TCP/IP protocol stack as a transport protocol. DDP is native to AppleTalk and is supported by APPLETLK.NLM. IPX is the primary protocol used by the NetWare IPX Router^TM software and is supported by NetWare. TCP/IP support is provided with TCPIP.NLM and is included with NetWare.

You need an SNMP management console application to retrieve AppleTalk data. Most third-party applications use TCP/IP to retrieve network management data from routers and servers on the network. However, APPLETLK.NLM enables an SNMP console to use DDP as the basic transport for communication with SNMP.NLM. Novell Internet Access Server 4.1 routing software can also support SNMP over TCP/IP, but this scenario requires that TCPIP.NLM also be loaded on the NetWare server.

Enabling SNMP Support on the AppleTalk Network

You do not need to enable SNMP. It is loaded and enabled along with the AppleTalk software. To access SNMP information about the local Novell router, load ATCON.

For more information about SNMP support and ATCON, refer to "Setting Up" in the routing documentation for AppleTalk.

SNMP Operations on the AppleTalk Network

SNMP support in Novell Internet Access Server 4.1 is compliant with the AppleTalk MIB specification (described in RFC 1243). A Management Information Base (MIB) is a collection of objects an application can access through SNMP. The AppleTalk MIB specification describes the following groups of objects:

• LocalTalk Link Access Protocol (LLAP)---This group provides information about all LocalTalk interfaces on the server. Only the objects llapInPkts and llapOutPkts are supported.
• AppleTalk Address Resolution Protocol (AARP)---This group maps AppleTalk node addresses and the addresses of the underlying Data-Link layer for data links other than LocalTalk. This group provides a view of the AARP Address Mapping table.
• AppleTalk Port (ATPort)---An AppleTalk port is a logical connection to a network over which AppleTalk packets can be transmitted. This group of objects provides information about the configuration of each AppleTalk port.
• Datagram Delivery Protocol (DDP)---This group provides statistical counters on the operation of DDP.
• Routing Table Maintenance Protocol (RTMP)---This group shows the table that the AppleTalk router uses to forward datagrams on the AppleTalk internetwork.
• Kinetics Internet Protocol (KIP)---This version of APPLETLK.NLM does not support this group. In other implementations of AppleTalk, this group provides status and routing information in a tunneling environment.
• Zone Information Protocol (ZIP)---This group shows the mapping of networks and zone names of which the AppleTalk router is aware.
• Name Binding Protocol (NBP)---This group provides information about the NBP table containing services registered with NBP and statistics about NBP operations in the server.
• AppleTalk Echo Protocol (AEP)---AEP is a Transport-level protocol that can verify the status of nodes on the internetwork. This group provides statistics about the operation of AEP.

APPLETLK.NLM supports the Get and GetNext SNMP operations. It does not support the Set SNMP operation or SNMP Traps.