Community Strings through GPO

dbagley

I'm having trouble automating my community string.  We are changing the current string to make it a bit more robust.  When I manually configure it on a Windows server it works great, but we have hundreds of servers which I obviously don't want to touch individually.  I've configured a GPO to push out the new Community String as well as the managing hosts (the same as in my manual config).  I can see the GPO has taken effect, but when I change the string inside Orion the test fails to validate the server.

In short- Manual community string creating works great.  Orion doesn't appear to like the string when pushed through a GPO.  Any ideas?

dbagley

Thanks for your reply.  As great a tool as the snmp enabler is, it still requires manual intervention in order to configure the snmp strings and permitter managers.  Another process which it can't help us with is to remove/replace old community strings.  This is a process we wished to automate, which Group Policy will allow us to do.

Luckily I found the answer yesterday.  Previously when configuring the GPO I was missing a registry piece.  First, configure your Communities and Permitted Managers under > Computer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Network > SNMP.  <---- ***This is what I was doing previously***  Yesterday I was checking the registry after applying this policy and it seemed to be missing some information.  Next I went to > Computer Configuration > Preferences > Windows Settings > Registry.  From here I created two new Registry Items.  One for my Community String and one for my Permitted Manager.  Through this process I provided the registry path where the parameters are located: HKLMSYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\SNMP\Parameters.  After browsing to the path I listed and selecting the Parameters you created in the first step, all the other necessary fields will be filled in for you.

After doing this it worked great on my Server 2008 R2 machines.  I still haven't gotten it working on my 2003 test server, but I actually thing that is server related.  So.....mystery solved!  Hope this helps someone else.