There are two popular ways to do SNMP with Perl that I am aware of. The Net::SNMP module from CPAN is actually different from the module you get if you download the Net-SNMP (formerly ucd-snmp) source from http://net-snmp.sourceforge.net/ and build it.

I've used both in an extremely high-volume network management system, and ended up having to switch to Net-SNMP a year or so ago, due to some flakiness on snmpgets and traps. I might have had as many as 16 simutaneous snmpgets on this system with around 200 of them firing off spread across two minute intervals.

To be fair, I can't say the system libraries were known to be perfect, but it was pretty much a stock 7.2 setup. Net::SNMP (above) from CPAN is easier to use, where the Net-SNMP module implementation is more arcane.. but very stable for me, outbound traps to NetCool were clearly more reliable.

You're going to have to build Net-SNMP from source to use the Perl modules (you need to cd into the perl directory and do a separate make ; make install as well, after the main build). So, remove any debs/rpms/etc before you do that make install.

I can't recall if you could do TCP through Net::SNMP, but I know you can with the Net-SNMP (formerly ucd). Thanks for reading all this, hope it helped.

-vlad