Solved it.
Amazingly, these authenticationFailure traps were being generated because
the wrong Write CommunityName string was being send during polling.
This occurred because the MLMs are set to take over polling.... and MLMs do
not use the ovsnmp database, but an ovsnmp.conf file in /var/adm/smv2
(Solaris 8)
Because NetView uses the xnmsnmpconf GUI to update the database, it is
difficult to make an editing mistake. But because an MLM uses an ascii
file, it is possible to make a mistake when hand editing the file. This
lead to the error... vis-a-vis where the write community name should be,
there was an extra colon e.g. 20:3:300:::::(:)::1:1:1
This meant that when NetView polled a device, it sent a colon as the write
community name!!
I find this behaviour very bizarre - as I would have thought that polling
involved reading MIB values. But it seams that the routers also checked the
write community name and complained that the string (:) was wrong - which
generated a trap.
Thanks for all your help. Hope this helps anyone who is having polling
problems of a similar nature. I certainly learned a lot whilst diagnosing
it.
John
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