This is a commonly misunderstood
trap. I've been explaining it for years.
Authentication traps are one of the
primary (aka generic) trap categories. It is sent as a security violation
notice when an SNMP request is made with an improper community name. The
"IBM" in the notice comes from the identification of the system
sending the trap.
The AIX servers in your network are being
queried with SNMP requests which have a community name which is not supported
at the AIX server sending the trap. Somewhere in the SNMP log at that
server you should be able to find the originator of the SNMP query which caused
the trap. That AIX server is configured correctly, the sender of the
request is not.
A common source of veritable storms of
these traps is the HP JetDirect Administration program. It uses SNMP
broadcasts to find its printers and any other SNMP devices on the segment start
sending authentication traps when it happens. This problem makes these
traps useless and severely impacts performance for NetView where they
exist.
Only the Cisco SNMP agents include the
name of the query originator in their authentication traps. You can read
those offending system names in trapd.log. The rest of the world requires
you to go to their system logs.
Make sure your NetView is not the source
of the traps by checking your own configuration. "xnmtrapconf -resolve
<AIX-System-Name-or-IP>" will tell you or scan
/usr/OV/conf/ovsnmp.conf. You should be using the same community name
those machines have configured. It is possible the community names were
changed on the AIX machines and the NetView administrator was not notified to
update the configuration.
Bill Evans
-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin Campbell
[mailto:kcampbell@tgen.org]
Sent: Thursday, April 08, 2004
3:53 PM
To: nv-l@lists.us.ibm.com
Subject: [nv-l] Community Name
I am seeing
the following warnings in the NV server events
A
IBM Incorrect Community Name (authenticationFailure Trap)
This error is
coming from a number of my AIX servers. I have looked at the /etc/snmp.conf
file and everything looks to be setup properly. Has anyone else seen these
types of warnings? And what was the fix?
Netview 7.1.3
AIX 5.1
Thanks in advance
KevinC