The interface data and such is all in community "private" where it really should be in "public". Someone should get in touch with wjhardaker to work out better config files to ship. One possibility is to add in some example lines in the snmpd.conf.local that suggest lines that might be added, such as: com2sec mynet 192.168.1.0/24 private where the 192.168.1 gets replaced by your local network. This then at least gives access to the private community to the local systems. Ideally what's desired is to have the public community have much of the useful information (e.g. interface stats), but be read-only. Private would be reserved for read/write. As shipped, the first question is, why aren't interfaces supported? Answer is they are, but you need to figure out how to ask the right question. Another option would be to add linuxconf support for snmp, which would help simplify matters.
Blame me for the clunky SNMP config, not Wes Hardaker. I have an improved "plain vanilla" config suggested by Wes that will be part of the next release. In addition, there will be some support for accessing the rpm database using the host resources mib. There may also be an implementation of the redhat enterprise tree if a sufficient number of interested developers can be found.
Replacing the /usr/share/snmp/snmpd.conf with the one sent to me made the system behave as I'd have expected. The interfaces data is now visible to community "public" as should be the default.
This problem has been fixed in Raw Hide. The new version of the file /usr/share/snmpd/snmpd.conf is included below for Red Hat 5.2 users: load 12 14 14 com2sec public default public group public any public view all included .1 80 access public "" any noauth 0 all none none