Different operating systems can come with different SNMP applications. Many hardware vendors also offer additional software that manages multiple machines using SNMP — for example, HP OpenView or Sun Management Center. For this section and the following ones, the Net-SNMP package (see http://net-snmp.sourceforge.net/) will be used. This package is included in all Linux distributions and works with almost all UNIX operating systems.

In order to install this package on Ubuntu Linux, we need to run the following command:

apt-get install snmp

For yum-based Linux distributions, the package is called net-snmp and the command to install it is as follows:

yum install net-snmp

The Net-SNMP project homepage also offers binaries for several platforms, including HP-UX and Fedora Linux. Fedora packages should also work on Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems.

It is also possible to build everything from the source for various UNIX operating systems such as AIX, HP-UX, and Solaris....