Editing Simple Network Management Protocol (section)

== Implementation issues ==
SNMP's powerful write capabilities, which would allow the configuration of network devices, are not being fully utilized by many vendors, partly because of a lack of security in SNMP versions before SNMPv3, and partly because many devices simply are not capable of being configured via individual MIB object changes.

Some SNMP values (especially tabular values) require specific knowledge of table indexing schemes, and these index values are not necessarily consistent across platforms. This can cause correlation issues when fetching information from multiple devices that may not employ the same table indexing scheme (for example fetching disk utilization metrics, where a specific disk identifier is different across platforms.)<ref>{{Cite web | url=http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/ip/simple-network-management-protocol-snmp/40700-snmp-ifIndex40700.html | title=Understanding Table Index Values in SNMP}}</ref>

Some major equipment vendors tend to over-extend their proprietary [[command line interface]] (CLI) centric configuration and control systems.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.snmp.com/conferences/ |title=SNMP Research presentations in favor of standards-based management over proprietary CLIs |publisher=SNMP Research |access-date=2010-10-12}}</ref>{{Failed verification|date=November 2010}}

In February 2002 the [[Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute]] (CM-SEI) Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center (CERT-CC) issued an Advisory on SNMPv1,<ref>{{citation |url=http://lwn.net/2002/0214/a/cert-snmp.php3 |title=CERT Advisory CA-2002-03 Multiple Vulnerabilities in Many Implementations}}</ref> after the [[Oulu University Secure Programming Group]] conducted a thorough analysis of SNMP message handling. Most SNMP implementations, regardless of which version of the protocol they support, use the same program code for decoding [[protocol data units]] (PDU) and problems were identified in this code. Other problems were found with decoding SNMP trap messages received by the SNMP management station or requests received by the SNMP agent on the network device. Many vendors had to issue patches for their SNMP implementations.<ref name="Tipton"/>{{rp|1875}}