Characters allowed within SNMP v.2 Community Strings

[Kevin Melton]

A collegue of mine and I were discussing characters that were eligible for use within SNMP v.2 Community Strings this morning. We have some older Cisco devices which we have some difficulty modeling in our Network Management system.

Is there any issue using special characters (for instance #$%^&*!) within SNMP v.2 Community strings on older routers and switches running antequated code??

[Joe Clarke]

The only characters that should not be in Cisco community strings are '@' and ':'. The '@' is used for community string indexing, and the ':' is often used as a field delimiter in management applications. Recently, a parser bug was found with '$' in community strings in which a string containing '$' cannot be unconfigured, but it does not affect SNMP polling.