SNMPGet for Windows and Community String Discovery

I recently needed to test SNMP connectivity from a Windows server to a device to prove that there was a problem outside my system causing SNMP polling to fail. Linux has NetSNMP, which comes with a command line snmpget utility. Windows has no such utility. A quick search on the internet helped with that. I found a utility from SNMPSoft, but of course I had to build a wrapper for it.



The wrapper is pretty simple since my objective is to do a quick check of SNMP connectivity. The version and the OID polled are hard coded to v2c and sysObjectID.

This could be used to discovery which community strings work on a system by using for loops in the command line. For example, if you wanted to test a bunch of community strings:

for %A in (public string1 string2 string3 string4 etc) do @snmpdiscover hostname %A

This will output something like this:

Host:localhost Community:public
1.3.6.1.4.1.311.1.1.3.1.1

Host:localhost Community:string1
%Failed to get value of SNMP variable. Timeout.

Host:localhost Community:string2
%Failed to get value of SNMP variable. Timeout.

Host:localhost Community:string3
%Failed to get value of SNMP variable. Timeout.

Host:localhost Community:string4
%Failed to get value of SNMP variable. Timeout.

Host:localhost Community:etc
%Failed to get value of SNMP variable. Timeout.

In this case, the first community string (public) worked, while the others didn't.