I've installed SNMP on a pretty clean copy of Gentoo, with minimal services running alongside, such as apache, samba, teamspeak and a Minecraft server. Otherwise it's as close to core as I can manage, no X11, no SELinux or IPtables. However, after installing SNMP and attempting to use its example conf file, I can't get a response from snmpwalk. I've tried altering the example file, following various versions of an snmpd.conf file from other Gentoo users, even resorting to using just "rwcommunity public" as the only line in a snmpd.conf file. Nothing works.

I've established with netstat -tulpen that snmpd is active and using port 161 UDP. I've tried performing exactly the same steps on another Gentoo machine, and snmpd was able to respond immediately to a snmpwalk query, so I'm only left with the conclusion that something in this system is either misconfigured, or interfering with snmp. Been bashing my head on this for the best part of a day, so any help would be muchly appreciated. Cheers!

Hi
Do you HAVE to use SNMP?
Asking because I hated it in the past and because you'll end up having problems (e.g. the limit of some 32bit counters like bytes read from HDD or network, which will reset to 0 once you reach their maximum value).
IF you can choose options, then I strongly recommend you to use "collectd" to gather your stats across all your servers, "influxdb" or "graphite/whisper" to store them and "grafana" to plot them.

Back to your original question, it's probably an issue with the server config and/or query (brilliant, isn't it? ).
You'll therefore have to stick to the simpliest config and query, post it here and see what the community says.