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.TH SNMP.CONF 5 "28 Aug 2001" VVERSIONINFO "Net-SNMP"
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snmp_config - describes how to configure the Net-SNMP applications.
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The Net-SNMP package uses various configuration files to configure its
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applications. This manual page merely describes the overall nature of
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them, so that the other manual pages don't have to.
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.SH "DIRECTORIES SEARCHED"
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First off, there are numerous places that configuration files can be
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found and read from. By default, the applications look for
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configuration files in the following 4 directories, in order:
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DATADIR/snmp, LIBDIR/snmp, and $HOME/.snmp. In each of these
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directories, it looks for files with the extension of both
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.IR conf " and " local.conf
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(reading the second ones last). In this manner, there are
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8 default places a configuration file can exist for any given
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configuration file type.
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Additionally, the above default search path can be overridden by
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setting the environment variable SNMPCONFPATH to a colon-separated
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list of directories to search for.
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Finally, applications that store persistent data will also look in the
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PERSISTENT_DIRECTORY directory for configuration files there.
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.SH "CONFIGURATION FILE TYPES"
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Each application may use multiple configuration files, which will
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configure various different aspects of the application. For instance,
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knows how to understand configuration
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directives in both the snmpd.conf and the snmp.conf files. In fact,
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most applications understand how to read the contents of the snmp.conf
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files. Note, however, that configuration directives understood in one
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file may not be understood in another file. For further information,
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read the associated manual page with each configuration file type.
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Also, most of the applications support a
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switch on the command line that will list the configuration files it
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will look for and the directives in each one that it understands.
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The snmp.conf configuration file is intended to be a application suite
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wide configuration file that supports directives that are useful for
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controlling the fundamental nature of all of the SNMP applications,
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such as how they all manipulate and parse the textual SNMP MIB files.
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.SH "SWITCHING CONFIGURATION TYPES IN MID-FILE"
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It's possible to switch in mid-file the configuration type that the
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parser is supposed to be reading. Since that sentence doesn't make
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much sense, lets give you an example: say that you wanted to turn on
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packet dumping output for the agent by default, but you didn't want to
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do that for the rest of the applications (ie, snmpget, snmpwalk, ...).
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Normally to enable packet dumping in the configuration file
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you'd need to put a line like:
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into the snmp.conf file. But, this would turn it on for all of the
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applications. So, instead, you can put the same line in the
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snmpd.conf file so that it only applies to the snmpd daemon. However,
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you need to tell the parser to expect this line. You do this by
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putting a special type specification token inside a [] set. In other
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words, inside your snmpd.conf file you could put the above snmp.conf
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directive by adding a line like so:
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[snmp] dumpPacket true
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This tells the parser to parse the above line as if it were inside a
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snmp.conf file instead of an snmpd.conf file. If you want to parse a
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bunch of lines rather than just one then you can make the context
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switch apply to the remainder of the file or until the next context
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switch directive by putting the special token on a line by itself:
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# make this file handle snmp.conf tokens:
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# return to our original snmpd.conf tokens:
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Any lines beginning with the character '#' in the configuration files
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are treated as a comment and are not parsed.
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Information about writing C code that makes use of this system in
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either the agent's MIB modules or in applications can be found in the
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man/snmp_config.5.def
