Communities Registry Settings

You can assign groups of hosts to simple network management protocol (SNMP) communities for limited security checking of agents and management systems for administrative purposes. The names you assign identify the communities. A host can belong to multiple communities at the same time, but an agent does not accept a request from a management system outside its list of acceptable community names.

The HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SNMP\Parameters\ValidCommunities registry key describes the communities that are accepted by the agent and the types of permission that they have. The following table shows the named values.

Value : type	Description
Community1 : REG_DWORD	Default is not set in the registry. Sets the permission for a community. 8 sets read/write permission. 4 sets read only permission. 1 sets no access.
Public : REG_DWORD	Default setting is 4 for read-only permission.

The following examples show how to assign permissions to a community.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SNMP\Parameters\Valid Communities]
"Public" = dword:4;          assigns read-only permission to Public
"Community1" = dword:8;      assigns read/write permissions to Community1
"Community2" = dword:1;      disables access to Community2

You can define communities to logically take advantage of the basic authentication service provided by SNMP. The following illustration shows two communities, Public1 and Public2.

See Also

SNMP Registry Settings

 Last updated on Saturday, April 10, 2004

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