Enable and configure SNMPv3 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3

The latest RHEL release is here. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.3 is a powerful and intelligent OS for any hybrid cloud, any cloud and any workload. It has key features – from container tools to deploy tomorrow´s technology, today. It has also SNMPv3 compatibility which gives us the opportunity to securely monitor the health state of our RHEL infrastructure.

Today, I´ll show you how you can enable and configure SNMPv3 on your RHEL. Regardless this article is based on the latest version of RHEL, you can apply the same procedure to previous versions. Before doing that, I guess you know: it is mandatory that your Red Hat Enterprise is registered to Red Hat Subscription Management.

Once you log in to Red Hat, open Terminal and type the command below to install SNMP Daemon. sudo is the SuperUser, yum is a tool for getting, installing, deleting, querying and managing software packages in Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions 5 and later. Type Y to confirm the installation.

sudo yum install net-snmp

Once the SNMP is installed and automatically started, you´ll need to stop the SNMP service in order to create an SNMP v3 user. Type the command below to stop the service.

sudo service snmpd stop

Create an SNMP user that will be used to authenticate to your Red Hat server. Alongside the user creation, we´ll also define the authentification algorithm, encryption, and key. Type the following command to do it:

net-snmp-create-v3-user [-ro] [-A authpass] [-a MD5|SHA] [-X privpass] [-x DES|AES] [username]

where [-ro] is read-only, [-A authpass] is SNMP v3 password, [-a MD5|SHA] are hash algorithm, [-X privpass] is encryption key, [-x DES|AES] are encryption algorithm and [username] is SNMPv3 user. The example from my environment is shown below.

sudo net-snmp-create-v3-user -ro -A mypassword -a SHA -X myencryptionkey -x AES jasmin

Once the SNMPv3 user is created, start the SNMPv3 service by executing the command below.

sudo service snmpd start

If you want to verify if SNMPv3 is working properly, you can perform an SNMP walk by using SNMPv3 credentials and parameters. Please note you will need to have “net-snmp-utils” installed on your Red Hat before doing the SNMP walk. In case you don’t have it, you´ll be informed in Terminal.

snmpwalk -u jasmin -A mypassword -a SHA -X myencryptionkey -x AES -l authPriv 127.0.0.1 -v3

We did it. Thank you for reading this article. In case of any questions, feel free to comment or contact me.