COMMAND
SNMPc
SYSTEMS AFFECTED
SNMPc
PROBLEM
John Comeau posted following. Many people snmpwalking your border
routers lately? SNMPc from CastleRock Computing may be to blame;
they responded promptly and responsibly to complaint of John.
Indeed this does asks for a seed router to start autodiscovery.
If you are new to the program, and who's not with a new version,
it's difficult to find the configuration to turn the thing off!
The multiple polls also seem to crash some Windows based FTP
daemons.
Same thing with older (4.2 and 4.3) versions, autodiscovery is
turned on by default and in some cases it can hang systems with
non fully compliant SNMP agents (As we discovered when it hung
some Wireless Acess Points in our network), as well as the system
(The autodiscovery feature is a real resource hog) specially if
you also run MRTG on the same machine.
Older versions doesn't ask for a seed router but start by taking
the default route and querying the known networks (default and
internal) and then running an incremental scans of all IP blocks
including the Private Class A,B and C blocks. The product is nice
and offers a lot of functionality but the autodiscovery process
is deffinitely a minus (OpenView behaves better).
SOLUTION
Authors of SNMPc is currently in the process of changing the
installation mechanism to ensure that users have control over the
process before the initial startup. This new implementation will
be in their next update.