The network management protocol is an application protocol by which the variables of an agent's MIB may be inspected or altered.
Communication among protocol entities is accomplished by the exchange of messages, each of which is entirely and independently represented within a single UDP datagram using the basic encoding rules of ASN.1 (as discussed in Section 3.2.2). A message consists of a version identifier, an SNMP community name, and a protocol data unit (PDU). A protocol entity receives messages at UDP port 161 on the host with which it is associated for all messages except for those which report traps (i.e., all messages except those which contain the Trap-PDU). Messages which report traps should be received on UDP port 162 for further processing. An implementation of this protocol need not accept messages whose length exceeds 484 octets. However, it is recommended that implementations support larger datagrams whenever feasible.
It is mandatory that all implementations of the SNMP support the five PDUs: GetRequest-PDU, GetNextRequest-PDU, GetResponse-PDU, SetRequest-PDU, and Trap-PDU.
RFC1157-SNMP DEFINITIONS ::= BEGIN
IMPORTS
ObjectName, ObjectSyntax, NetworkAddress, IpAddress, TimeTicks
FROM RFC1155-SMI;
-- top-level message
Message ::=
SEQUENCE {
version -- version-1 for this RFC
INTEGER {
version-1(0)
},
community -- community name
OCTET STRING,
data -- e.g., PDUs if trivial
ANY -- authentication is being used
}
-- protocol data units
PDUs ::=
CHOICE {
get-request
GetRequest-PDU,
get-next-request
GetNextRequest-PDU,
get-response
GetResponse-PDU,
set-request
SetRequest-PDU,
trap
Trap-PDU
}
-- the individual PDUs and commonly used
-- data types will be defined later
END