[CentOS] SNMP and OID/MIB/MRTG

Bob Hoffman bob at bobhoffman.com
Fri Sep 12 02:55:06 UTC 2008


Thanks for the input..now that I have really been reading...I find that
MRTG, or any of those programs is easy...

It is snmp that requires the college degree. I just ordered 2 books on it.

There is no way to poll the hardware without extensive knowledge of snmp.
The man pages are horrendous and some are outdated. Obviously you need to
know how to build and manage MIBs so you can then call to them with MRTG or
the other programs.


So...

Needless to say, MRTG is now off as is snmp. I think this will be one of
those 'maybe next year when I can learn all about acessing hardware like an
engineer' and all. 

I will just do some light reading with the books and maybe in the future I
will figure out how to make mibs so I can grab them.

That is the issue, not mrtg, it is snmp.

One of those fun linux user things...I want to use this program..okay,
easy...but you need a college degree in 'this program' to access the first
one..

Ugh...

I'll just stick with webalizer and top for keeping tabs on the network. Then
in the future, if I persue the degree in snmp and learn all about MIBs, I
will check out the program.

Wish I had the last two days back...what a complete waste.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: centos-bounces at centos.org 
> [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] On Behalf Of nate
> Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2008 10:17 PM
> To: centos at centos.org
> Subject: Re: [CentOS] SNMP and OID/MIB/MRTG
> 
> Bob Hoffman wrote:
> 
> While it is somewhat outdated, MRTG itself is outdated as 
> well, I wrote a howto for MRTG about 5-6 years ago -
> 
> http://howto.aphroland.org//HOWTO/MRTG/
> 
> (I haven't maintained it in years, and have no real plans to 
> update the site again in the future)
> 
> > Question 1- does snmpd have to run as a daemon, or only run 
> once so I 
> > can get OID and MIBs from it?
> 
> If your wanting to collect data using SNMP then anything your 
> collecting data from must be running a SNMP daemon. MRTG is 
> fully capable of executing scripts to gather data as well.
> 
> > Question 2- does anyone know the command in snmp to get the 
> required 
> > OID and MIBs that MRTG needs to use? Or at least the name 
> of it? There 
> > are a lot of poorly written man pages, but so far all of 
> them require 
> > an MIB or OID to use the commands I have read.
> 
> Defines "needs to use", mrtg comes with a tool called 'cfgmaker'
> which will scan any SNMP target and automatically generate a 
> configuration for all of the network interfaces it can find 
> on the target. You can then use mrtg against that config file 
> to gather stats.
> 
> > Question 3- since not going outside of the server, is there any 
> > security setting in some snmp config file that makes it 
> only look on 
> > my local server and not allow others to use it or hack it?
> 
> You can add a iptables firewall rule to reject packets 
> destined to your SNMP server (161/udp) unless they come over 
> the loopback interface.
> 
> > Question 4- all over the internet there are examples in 
> MRTG using all 
> > sorts of made up names like 'crazyguy33 at servername' and things like 
> > that for the cfg file. And alsoin the snmp forum posts, but no one 
> > really talks about where this name comes from other than it is 
> > assigned to your network device or something.
> 
> In the example above crazyguy33 is the SNMP community string 
> assigned to the system(configured in snmpd.conf). By default 
> the read-only string is public. You can set it to anything you want.
> 
> > Any help appreciated. I will post the final solution to how to 
> > configure snmp and mrtg to work on centos5.2 when I finally 
> figure it 
> > out so no one else has to take all week to do so!!!
> 
> You may want to look into using cacti or some other tool 
> instead, MRTG has some pretty severe limitations. Cacti uses 
> RRDTool as it's back end, RRDTool is more or less the 
> successor to MRTG and was initially released I think about 10 
> years ago, to give an idea how old MRTG is.
> 
> I still use MRTG on my home network, though mostly because 
> it's legacy shit that I setup 7 years ago and haven't moved 
> to cacti yet, it slowly breaking down as time goes on since 
> I'm not maintaining it anymore.
> 
> nate
> 
> _______________________________________________
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS at centos.org
> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos




More information about the CentOS mailing list