Does the SNMP Proxy Support IP-Based SNMP Managers?

[Henry.G]

I want to monitor my A140 STBs, distributed around the Internet, using Cilutions SNMP Proxy. But I have my own SNMP Manager (not The Dude) to monitor devices in my network. My SNMP Manager requires that each device in the network have a unique IP address. It looks like the model described elsewhere in this forum, where The Dude is used for example, supports managing devices where the IP address for every device is the same (e.g., 127.0.0.1 if the SNMP Proxy is running locally) but the SNMP community id is different. That's how the SNMP Manager and the SNMP Proxy identify unique devices, by community id.

This model does not work for me because my SNMP Manager identifies unique devices by IP only. Also, my SNMP Manager uses ping as part of its monitoring of devices - and ping needs a unique IP address for each device as well.

Is there any way to set up the SNMP Proxy to use IP addresses instead of SNMP community ids to identify devices (i.e., Amino STBs)?

[Cilutions Support]

Yes. The SNMP Proxy supports adding an IP-to-STBSerialNo association at proxy start-up. Here the user creates a forwarder.csv file (i.e., an Excel Spreadsheet) associating serialnos with IP addresses. This file should be in the same directory as the forwarder.exe binary. It is parsed by the SNMP Proxy at start-up. An example file for a network with two STBs is as follows:

GF3111D0021666,10.6.4.2
GC5010D0002828,10.6.4.3

The SNMP Proxy spoofs the IP addresses listed letting an external application, running on another computer on the local LAN, issue SNMP commands (GET, SET, etc.) and ping commands by unique IP rather than community id. Here the SNMP write community is "private" and the read community is "public" for all IPs (i.e., all devices have the same community id strings).

Note that this mode requires that the SNMP Manager (and the machine issuing pings) be on a separate computer from the computer on the local LAN where the SNMP Proxy is running. This configuration is necessary for the SNMP Proxy to be able to spoof the IP addresses.

A common configuration of the SNMP Proxy in this IP-to-STBSerialNo mode is to add a secondary IP address of 10.6.4.1 with a netmask of 255.255.0.0 to the machine hosting the SNMP Manager (even if the primary address of the machine is in, say, the 192.168.1.0 subnet). To add 10.6.4.1 access the Properties of the Internet Protocol on the local adapter, select Advanced, and add 10.6.4.1/255.255.0.0.

Then edit the forwarder.reg file on the machine hosting the SNMP Proxy to include these settings:

This is network adapter to listen for ICMP (for pings) and SNMP requests from an external SNMP Manager:
"NetworkAdapter"="Local Area Connection"
Your network (default of 10.6 supporting thousands of receivers):
"Network"="10.6.0.0"
Mask (should not be necessary to change this):
"NetMask"="255.255.0.0"
Same as "Network" but without last 2 octets. The last dot is necessary:
"NetPrefix"="10.6."
Optional - IP address of the local snmp proxy (just use this setting if you are not sure):
"MyIP"="10.6.6.6"
Optional - IP address of the snmp manager (just use this setting if you are not sure):
"ManagerIP"="10.6.4.1"

Start the SNMP Proxy in the usual way (typically as a service).

From the management machine you can test the basic configuration by trying to ping one or more of the 10.6.4.X addresses (used in the example). The SNMP Proxy will respond to the ping if the STB with the associated serialno is active. It will ignore the ping if the associated serialno is inactive.