I solved the issue that we were having.

It turns out that in our install the native SNMP daemon only likes to run on port 161. Once we swapped ports so that the AIX SNMP daemon runs on 161 and the Net-SNMP daemon runs on 1610 we were 90% of the way there. The rest of the issue was some minor Cisco ACL's and an AIX route command. This is because the host to be monitored is on a diffrent network then the monitoring host.

Thanks for all the help. I plan on getting a propper write up going later on this week to fully explain this approach in hopes that it proves useful.

I dont have much net-snmp proxy setup experience.  Just reading thru some docs and web posts this would be kind of what you want to do.  it gets longer when you start using V2 or V3 as you need to include your auth in the proxy line.

proxy -v 1 -c remote_host .1.3.6.1.2.1.4.

com2sec readonly default public

http://net-snmp.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Snmpd_proxy

Wish I could be of more help

I had some problems when i upgraded a server from aix 5.2 to 5.3 and tried to stop using net-snmpd and use the built in snmpd.  Not sure if this will help but worth a try.  stop net-snmp and all the associated services, snmpmibd, hostmibd, snmpd, and aixmibd.  Then restart the services and not net-snmp.  If its an option I might even take net-snmpd out of inittab or rc.d or wherever you are starting it from and restart the server. Other things I have found as gotchas, snmp v1 works great, snmp v2 has issues, snmp v3 I have never gotten to work, so that said I always just use snmp v1.  I don't use passwords and I keep everything set to the default public group for read access.  Below is what the snmpd.conf looks like on all 16 lpars i monitor.  Assuming you are on 5.3 or higher you should not need to use net-snmpd

logging         file=/usr/tmp/snmpd.log         enabled
logging         size=100000                     level=0

community       public
#community       private 127.0.0.1 255.255.255.255 readWrite
#community       system  127.0.0.1 255.255.255.255 readWrite 1.17.2

view            1.17.2          system enterprises view

trap            public          127.0.0.1       1.2.3   fe      #loopback

#snmpd          maxpacket=1024 querytimeout=120 smuxtimeout=60

smux            1.3.6.1.4.1.2.3.1.2.1.2         gated_password  #gated
smux            1.3.6.1.4.1.2.3.1.2.2.1.1.2     dpid_password   #dpid


snmpd smuxtimeout=200 #muxatmd
smux 1.3.6.1.4.1.2.3.1.2.3.1.1 muxatmd_password #muxatmd

I am using snmp deamon that comes with AIX on 5.3.x, I had to use Net-SNMP on AIX 5.2.x in order to get anything to report.

I am using Cacti 0.8.7a

I am using templates I found on the Cacti forums http://forums.cacti.net/about6072.html, but I can also use the generic snmp-enabled host templates in cacti to monitor everything.

Make sure you have /etc/snmpd.conf or /etc/snmpdv3.conf configured I don't use V3 so in my configs i use snmpd.conf

Make sure all of your snmpd services are started
snmpd, snmpmibd, hostmibd, and aixmibd

I am reading that you can pull stats on some things just not cpu and net interface is that correct?

Can you walk the tree in command line and get the interface stats?

Thanks kondoor - I was getting nowhere.

Well, run into a snag with spamassassin. I have downloaded the source files, etc. and now I need to do some reading. And look more closely at yor initial question

I think there was some discussion earlier in the forums - but did not come to a complete resolution. When I get finished with spamassassin - I'll look into it.

Please keep us posted on your learning experiences!