[CentOS] One for the Cisco experts...

Wed Apr 22 23:33:24 UTC 2009
Craig White <craigwhite at azapple.com>

On Wed, 2009-04-22 at 17:50 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Craig White wrote:
> >
> > OK, I've been tracking this conversation, installed/configured/started
> > OpenNMS and have discovered everything and in fact, edited
> > service-configuration.xml as recommended.
> > 
> > I'm sort of comparing this to Zenoss which I had to stop (snmp
> > conflicts) to run OpenNMS.
> > 
> > I can see each port on the 48 port managed switch and go to 'View Node
> > Link Detailed Info' but it doesn't tell me much about the
> > device/computer plugged into a specific port.
> 
> Let it soak overnight.  It goes out of its way not to kill your network 
> and has a long startup delay and times between polls - all tunable in 
> the xml files, of course.
----
yeah, Zenoss seems to default on collecting each device every 12 hours
and I never bothered with the timing of it.
----
> > While I don't want to be quick to dismiss OpenNMS, it seems to fall way
> > short of Zenoss so I'm thinking that there's a bunch of stuff that
> > probably needs to be tweaked.
> 
> It mostly does the right thing by default, although if you want 
> bandwidth graphs on the non-IP ports on your switches you either need to 
> set it up for each node or change snmpStorageFlag to "all'
> in datacollection-config.xml
> 
> I am interested in a comparison with Zenoss - but wait until you know 
> your way around opennms.  Just ask on the opennms list if it doesn't do 
> something you expect.
----
I was hoping not to subscribe to another list but maybe I will and just
monitor the list.

Thus far (and admittedly this is premature), I find Zenoss a lot beefier
but I spent a ton of time setting it up the first time until I figured
things out whereas I spent comparatively no time setting OpenNMS up. But
I have learned things along the way, especially getting SNMP set up on
everything I could.
----
> > I got the impression that NetDisco would actually tell me the IP Address
> > (perhaps reverse the DNS name) of the device connected to specific port
> > on my managed switch. I didn't go for the NetDisco route for install
> > because I didn't like the idea of getting a bunch of CPAN perl modules
> > installed rather than using rpm packages.
> 
> Assuming it can get the info from the switch, it will - and give you 
> clickable link to the other device's node info.
----
That's something that I've never been able to do in Zenoss and if it's
possible, I don't know. I think Zenoss only has forums and not mail list
and I truly don't like forums.

This is a Dell PowerConnect 6248 'managed' switch so I would think it
could. I enabled monitoring on all of the ports just in case. That would
beat the brains out of the spreadsheets I've been maintaining on
interconnects between patch panel, switch and office map to identify but
since this is newly rewired, I am not having much trouble.

One thing that is throwing me for a loop is that it says all the
Macintosh systems are a 10Mbps SNMP connection but on the Macs
themselves, they clearly indicate 1Gbps. This somewhat tracks all of the
pain that I have had with SNMP collection on the Macs, which on Zenoss
has been less than spectacular. For example, I get installed software
list, total installed memory, total hard drive space, free hard drive
space on all Linux and Windows systems but only get total hard drive
space and total installed memory on Macs. On Zenoss, I have resorted to
ssh collection on Macs because snmp collection just sort of sucks.

Craig



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