I'm trying to get my head around SNMP for a project I'm working on. After I failed miserably getting it to work in my company's network, I set up a simple 3-device network to test things on, consisting of two Windows 10 PCs and a manageable switch between them.
I installed the optional feature "SNMP" on both PCs, made sure the service is running correctly and configured both services to accept SNMP queries from each other. I made sure to open up UDP port 161 in both PCs firewalls. Then I got the Net-SNMP binaries in order to use SNMPGET and SNMPWALK. As an alternative, I set up the SNMP extension for PHP through xampp (since I want to use PHP in my project once I get SNMP to work). Finally, I installed wireshark to monitor what exactly is going on and this is what I found:
When I try SNMPGET or SNMPWALK either through cmd or as a PHP command, I always get a timeout message. Wireshark is showing the get-next-request leaving one PC and arriving correctly on the other, so the network connection itself is working fine. But the receiving PC never sends a response. As I said, I'm pretty new to SNMP and I'm at a loss as to why this is happening. As I understand it, the optional feature for Windows 10 comes with its own SNMP agent, correct? If so, what could cause it to simply ignore an incoming request from a valid source IP?
The funny thing is that this even happens when I try to send an SNMP query to 127.0.0.1. I have no idea what I'm doing wrong...
Thanks to the comment of Lex Li, I was able to finally figure out which step I made a mistake with:
When setting up the SNMP service, under the security tab, I had to add 'public' as an accepted community name (with READ-ONLY rights). I figured since 'public' is sort of the standard read-only community, it would be accepted by default, which apparently it is not.
Alternatively, I guess I could have added my own communtiy name, but I didn't try that since I only want to read some values through SNMP anyways and read-only access is all I need for that.
Thank you very much Lex Li, I'm off to continue my project now!