[CentOS] One for the Cisco experts...

Thu Apr 23 20:33:52 UTC 2009
Craig White <craigwhite at azapple.com>

On Thu, 2009-04-23 at 11:46 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Craig White wrote:
> > 
> >> 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.
> > ----
> > admittedly, this analysis is less than 24 hours after installation
> > but...
> > 
> > Zenoss and OpenNMS seem to be scratching similar but different itches.
> 
> In spite of the S in SNMP there is nothing simple about network 
> management, so the overall goal of the frameworks will be to make sense 
> out of your network and monitor for problems, keeping a history of some 
> of the values and presenting a nice user interface.  It is a complex 
> problem so different approaches will probably have different good and 
> bad points.
----
OK, I shut down OpenNMS and started up Zenoss again and noticed that the
connected devices actually do show up on my 8 port managed Linksys POE
switch...hmmm

So I dig a little further with snmpwalk and have come to realize that
"IF-MIB::ifAlias" is where these values are returned from snmpwalk which
is populated with values from my Linksys switch but not the Dell
PowerConnect 6248, where they are all returned as an empty string.

So it occurs to me that OpenNMS is more adept at tracking layer 2 than
Zenoss.

One thing that I notice that is different is that the Linksys reports
each port with a different sequential MAC address where the Dell switch
reports each port with the same MAC address.

I snmpwalk the Dell switch and grep for the IP address or the MAC
address of one of my servers and get nothing. ;-(

So I gather that I either have to figure out how to get the Dell switch
to capture the data for the connected device so it returns to me via an
snmpwalk or wait until Zenoss starts crawling through the various
network layers to create the connection link as it currently does in
OpenNMS.

Craig


-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.