s l a m

Updated: 10/21/02; 12:37:37 AM.

activeRenderer vs 1.2.1 Released

Features OPML inclusion - a step towards transclusion

today

categories:

or search:

Monday, June 10, 2002

SNMP Basic Tools
John covered a number of basic SNMP tools this morning. The most impressive seems to be Net-SNMP
The Net-SNMP project is hosted at SourceForge. The Net-SNMP agent implements the standard MIB-II, more interestingly for host monitoring, it also implements both the 'ucdavis' Enterprise MIB and the Host Resources MIB. Net-SNMP is mostly a Unix based subsystem.
MacOS X admins should refer to the Net-SNMP for MacOS X site.
Windows 2000 server has pretty good support for SNMP built-in, even though there have been recent vulnerability issues.
Garth William's site points to a host of PC/Windows SNMP resources.
For low-level SNMP programming in Perl, Simon Leinen's BER.pl and SNMP_Session.pm modules, avalaible through CPAN, seem good enough. No implementation of MIB vocabulary though. A Perl module is also part of Net-SNMP.
Scotty is a TCL shell that is cool to query MIBs if you're into TCL.
Jürgen Schönwälder, Scotty's author, has also released scli, the SNMP Command Line Interface, for less TCL minded sysadmins.
Python lovers should check the PySNMP project on SourceForge.
I'll probably set-up an OPML based directory for SNMP resources based on the tutorial later today.

9:13:35 PM    comments:   Google It!

Host Resources MIB
RFC 1514 defines a Management Information Base for host systems.

11:26:22 AM    comments:   Google It!

Live From Usenix Tutorial Sessions
The wireless connection just came up in our meeting room. I'm currently attending John Sellens' System And Network Monitoring tutorial
david The tutorial so far focuses on the SNMP protocol, as a mean of polling or traping data out of systems to a central location. I had never used SNMP on a regular basis before, and just realised 3 things.
There are now very (too) informative agents for all kind of operating systems that deliver 'global' data on a computer status. SNMP is definitely not limited to routers and network devices.
SNMP rides on UDP protocol ports 161 and 162, which mean that there is no guarantee that a manager will get an answer everytime it polls an agent, and that an agent issueing a trap will be heard every time, specially if the management is done from a 'far' remote location.
Managing from outside a firewall is something that you do not (as in never, ever) want to do with SNMP v1, since all data, including SNMP passwords travel in the clear. SNMP v3 offers ways to encrypt all the datagrams, and is the protocol to use with remote monitoring.
I've just stressed this last point to John, who is going emphasize this in his 'SNMP' security chart after recess.

1:56:09 PM    comments:   Google It!