[CentOS] CentOS/SNMP update breaks MRTG?

Wed Jul 15 19:23:57 UTC 2009
Noob Centos Admin <centos.admin at gmail.com>

Hi,

> java.  I don't remember seeing this problem when installing from the opennms yum
> repository, though.

I didn't expect it either, honestly. In most cases, updates/installs
does go relatively painlessly if I don't mess up following
instructions/guides. In this case, I guess I just tripped up over the
unessential jrrd.

> Are you getting any benefit from mixing all of these non-stock versions on your
> system?  How many different repositories that contain conflicting versions of
> packages do you use?  Normally epel doesn't overwrite stock packages and opennms

I've no idea honestly, my primary role isn't server admin and I'm just
winging it as I go along to support what I'm supposed to be doing with
the server.

The PG 8.4 was because we're developing something for our client who's
on that server, so I'm standardizing on 8.4 and likely will stick with
it for quite a while, rather than going with the 8.3 since there
appears to be quite a few changes in 8.4, especially on warm standby
features.

Apart from what's needed, I usually try to avoid installing things on
the public web servers we have.

> That is normal - typically you'd run opennms on a machine dedicated to
> monitoring, with perhaps thousands of targets so it wouldn't be running a lot of
> other services.

Well, unfortunately, there's only that pair of machine in that
particular location. I really needed the monitoring tool up on it
because I've been noticing a higher than normal load since the
weekend. My quick hack of a PHP/cat /proc/loadavg script was also
alerting me consistently. After a couple of hours on opennms, it
became obvious that something was hitting the server. Turns out that
the client did not set the appropriate measures on their forum
software and bots were having a field day hitting it to break the
image recognition and finally got through to spamming.

> Removing it won't bother opennms.  It has an assortment of application probes
> that it uses in addition to snmp and is intended to work automatically with
> large numbers of targets - when it discovers a node (or you add it),  it probes
> the application ports to see what is running, then periodically tests again and
> notifies you when something that was previously running stops working.  However,
> it is very configurable and you can add/remove whatever you want.

Yup, it's pretty cool and that web interface really helps. While I am
perfectly at home using a text editor, I really don't want to have to
wade through and edit tons of text just to do something a few clicks
should handle.

Thanks again for pointing me to opennms :)