Understanding the simple network management protocol is absolutely critical for you to pass the security
plus exam.
However I've covered it so beautifully in the network plus I'm just going to go ahead and play my network
plus video that I did on S&P.
Let's take a look.
Now you may not believe this but I Mike Myers am a lazy person.
No no it's true I am well.
OK let me let me qualify that.
The ultimate goal in my opinion of a good network administrator is their ability to sit in a chair the
entire day and never get up.
Now in order to do that especially when I have a more complicated network I'm going to have to be getting
up a lot if I have to deal with switches or routers or printers or individual host systems.
There are times when I'm going to have to get up so in order to alleviate this we use something called
simple network management protocol or S&P.
S&P is a tool which allows us to administer and manage network devices from hopefully a single source
where we can do whatever we need to do now in order to see how this works.
We're going to have to break down a bunch of terms that you're going to be seeing on the network plus.
So the first thing we need to do is let us know who's who in the zoo as an MP if we're going to have
it as an MP network while you're going to have to have devices to talk to.
So let's start with this printer right here.
Now this printer isn't just like some little home printer some big powerful laser printer.
It probably serves 100 different people in an office.
Now as an MP works great with SMP printers but we have to do stuff to it to make it as an MP capable.
The first thing we need to do is we apply something called an agent now an agent is software built into
the printer from the factory that gives it the ability to do SMP.
When we talk to the printer via SMP we're really talking to the agent.
So this is a device it's on the network now it's going to be on the network and it's a TCAP IP network.
Well it's going to need certain ports so individual devices use UDP 1:06 one they listen on UDP 1:06
one if they're unencrypted and if they're encrypted they use less and then it's going to be UDP port
1 0 1 6 1 that's what they listen on.
So now that I've got this device that is SMP capable we use the term managed device so this is a managed
device and it's capable of communication via SMP.
Now that's only half of the equation.
The other half is that we've got to have some device that we can use to actually talk to these devices.
So here I've just got a particular system.
Now this system I'm going to task as the system upon which I will do all the talking to SMP devices.
So we call that an S and P manager.
Now that's just the system itself.
More importantly is that it's running some kind of software some kind of utility some kind of application
that is an SNP tool and this is the interface that I use to communicate with my manage devices and we
call that a network management station or just an m s.
And since he's also part of the TZP IP network Well he's going to be on UDP port 1 6 2.
And if he's encrypted it will be again Teale s and it will be UDP port 1 0 1 6 2.
Keep in mind these are listening ports.
OK.
Now these are the basic pieces that make up an S&P network.
Now let's talk about how we're going to communicate between in this particular example these two guys
right here.
So it's given arbitrary command So let's say via the end and as I talked to this manage device and I
go Hey how many pages are printed.
And since it's a printer the S&P it will respond back by saying Well 15 pages are ok doesn't really
say sir I just thought that was funny but it will respond.
Now the important thing to remember is that S&P is not just for printers.
So for example if I'm trying to talk to a switch in this example and I ask him how many pages are printed.
Well he's going to say it because you know he doesn't have any pages to print so it's very important
that when we're talking about setting up SMP networks that we have some way to talk properly to different
devices.
The secret to this is built into every managed device is something called a management information base
or MIB not Man in Black Management Information base.
So again this was built in at the factory and it's really a database that we query to be able to talk
to that particular device different devices have different MIB.
So if you want your enemy to talk to one particular type of device Well if you have a fancy and it may
have some basic commands built in.
But we normally do that as part of setting up an end and this is we're going to download from somewhere
on the Internet.
A command set that allows us to query every particular device on our managed network.
OK.
That's how the communication takes place.
Now let's talk about some of the communications we actually do.
There's lots of these but the network plus really only covers three and they're the big ones anyway
so that's good.
The first one is called Get now get is the standard query use with s and MP a get consists of the EMIs
sending a get to a message device and then that device in turn making some kind of response and then
we can ask things like how many pages have been printed.
And that would be a great example of a get and then a get response.
That's not the only way to talk to a device.
The other thing we can do is something called a trap now a trap is something that we actually set up
on the devices itself.
There are things that happen in a network I don't want to wait for a query with this printer starts
to overheat.
What if I have a switch that half of the ports are suddenly overloaded with the data.
I want to be able to set up on my manage devices some way to go hey I got an issue and I want you to
know about it right now.
So that's what a tramp is all about.
We set it up on the manage devices and then the trap is then sent whenever it hits a particular value
to the name S itself.
OK so we got get we got trap the last one it's called Walk walk is kind of like a batch process of gets.
There are situations where you want to ask a lot of stuff from a managed advice and that's where we
use the term walk.
Now what by itself is kind of an uncommon term even though that's what we hear on the network.
Plus the more common thing is what we call as an MP walk which is a actual Linux utility you can rent
it from your command prompt and you can talk to your devices.
So SMP walk is this big batch of good and it looks something like this so you can see this is just one
SMP walk in and it's responding as though I had sent a whole bunch of gets in one big batch and there
are situations where we would need that as well.
OK now that we understand the basic pieces of SMP what I want to talk about now is versions.
S&P has been around for a really long time and there's three different versions of SMP with names like
S&P version 1 version 2 and version 3.
Now you need to understand what the differences are.
First of all version 1 was the first version out of the block and it works great.
And I say works because there's still a lot of devices out there that use it as an MP had a fairly limited
command set compared to later versions and it had absolutely no encryption at all.
So as an MP version two came along fairly quickly afterwards discovered that encryption might be a good
thing where people can plug into your network and turn off routers and things like that.
They discovered encryption is a good idea.
So SMP version 2 came along which slightly expanded the command set but more importantly it was the
first time it had some encryption.
It was good but the encryption was a little weak S&P version 3 which is the ultimate version of SMP
uses a very robust T.L. less form of encryption.
And it could do really robust SMP that's the version you're going to be using.
Now people worry about this a little bit and you really shouldn't because like what if my router is
only using version 2.
Well other than slightly weaker encryption you're OK.
One end in this can talk version 1 to 1 managed of Isaac doc version 2 to another device version 3 to
another.
So it's common within an enterprise to have different versions of SMP and it's OK.
All right.
Well I think we've talked enough.
Let's do some real SMP.
So what I'd like to do right now is we're going to get into a Cisco switch which is SMP capable.
We're gonna light up SMP on the switch and then we're going to actually set up an end in this Talk to
the switch and get some output.
So the first thing we're going to do is get started right here on my Cisco switch.
You can see that I've already started up puttee and I've logged into my switch and I'm going to go ahead
and start SMP on this particular switch.
So I've gone ahead and enabled it.
I'm in it config t ready to go so I have to type in this command
so I type in as an empty server and then I type in the word community.
See I spelled it right this time.
And then I'm willing to give it the name of the community I'll explain what the community is.
And just a second and then I'm going to type in our show and I'll explain what that is.
When we hit communities I hit enter here and you can see that it's accepted the command we have now
turned on as an MP on our manager device starting as an MP On-Demand device is fairly trivial you could
say we ran one command and it's up and cooking but there were a couple of things in that command that
we need to talk about.
First of all is the word community a community is simply an organisation of managed devices so you can
set up a community for all the first floor switches or you can set up a community for all of the devices
that are in our network.
A community is a tool that we use for organisations so you need to set up a community and say that that
particular switch is a member of.
In this case total home.
Now the second thing you saw was our O or Read-Only.
S&P is not just for monitoring stuff it's also for queering stuff and making changes and the Read-Only
versus read write is a setting that you put on the device to go.
Listen I'm going to let you only be read only so nobody can make changes to you or I can set up for
read right so that if we want to make changes from an and unless we can.
Bottom line is you're going to have to not only turn on an MP you're going to have to define a community
and you're going to have to define as read only or read right now.
That was easy ready for the fun part.
We're going to configure and M-S now.
Now there's a Brazilian and then this is out there and I'm not going to try to claim one over another.
The one I'm going to show you right here is kind of a fun one and it's a free one it's called cacti
and it takes a little bit more screwdriver than certain iness but I like it and I'm comfortable with
it.
So and I've already got it installed.
We just need to configure it.
So let's take a look and see how cacti works.
Welcome to my M-S.
What do you look at it right here is just a virtual machine.
I'm using Oracle virtual box because it's fun and free.
And I'm running to buntu server and in here is my end of this.
So what I want to do is I've got this guy up and running already took me awhile to get him configured.
But the important thing I want you to catch right here is at the end and this is just running in a virtual
machine it doesn't have to physically be on this particular computer.
In fact it's very common it's just running on some virtual machine in the server room.
What is kind of cool is how we access it.
Like most of these all we do is we access it through a web page.
So right here is the IP address for my Twichell machine and you can see that I'm in the cacti interface
right now so when I want to do is I want to go connect to that switch that I set up a moment ago.
So what I've done is I clicked on devices and I'm just going to hit add.
Give it a description.
My switch hostname or IP address I know the IP address and I can put in a template so a template is
just give me some basic ideas how to talk to this guy so they have this generic SMP enabled host and
couple more things I need to hit here.
So the community I set my numbers.
Total home.
And I think we're pretty much ready to go.
So let me go ahead and hit create and if I've done it right so save is successful.
So what's happened now is the infamous now has a basic template and is aware and says yep there's a
switch out there and I can talk to it now just because I'd made that connection what I need to now do
is to create some kind of graphs I want to see what I can do with this guy now making a graph can take
a little while so I'm going to kind of skip this part because luckily for you I've already made a bunch
of these graphs.
So as you look on the screen you can see that I've got things like for example on this one interface
right here.
This is Port 20 which is this is actually my way an interface so port 20 on this which plugs in to my
firewall router and I can look at this and I can actually watch how heavy my traffic is.
Over the course of this morning from around 9:00 a.m. till just a little bit after lunch.
So this is one example of how we can set up and use an end in this.
This is just a taste of the power that is SMP.
Now I need to warn you about a couple of things.
For example for me it's a lot of fun to be using cacti but it's only because I know it there's a lot
of enemies out there for you to try and I invite you to play around a little bit with this.
Secondly we've just done the lightest configuration with SMP.
There are aspects of SMP that are really pretty complicated setting up encrypted as an MP for example
can be a real challenge.
The bottom line is we've certainly covered everything for the network plus.
And then some SMP is a wonderful tool and the coolest part about SMP is that you'd be shocked at the
number of switches and routers and devices and hosts that already support it.
There's a pretty good probability that you can get out there play with S&P a little bit because you've
got all the stuff you need right now.