Noob Centos Admin wrote: > Thanks guys for all the suggestions. None of it changed the situation > but I'm beginning to think that it might have to do with SNMP not > accepting word names in MRTG, or more specifically some kind of > language encoding issue. > > This is because of the following reasons > > 1. It's been pointed that out that MRTG need to be started with the > options env LANG=C because it won't work properly if LANG is UTF8 > > 2. On some options I try in MRTG, the log shows some error about Wide > characters returned from SNMP, and I see a chinese character, which > obviously shouldn't be a return value. > > 3. Addressing SNMP variables by name does not work in MRTG, but works > from command line. e.g. something like ssRawCpuLoad is fine in command > line, but does not work in MRTG config file, only the dot-numeric > equivalent would return some kind of data in MRTG. > > 4. The problem started AFTER I rebooted the system after the update, > so the reboot might have possibly allowed some settings to take effect > with regards to the server's encoding. Maybe Centos 5.3 went from an > EN_US language default to UTF8 default? > > If this is indeed the case, how would I possible change the > interface/shell language settings back to the English one, since I > don't typically need to input non-English characters nor view them in > shell? > > I've added a LANG='en_US' and export LANG line in /etc/profile but it > doesn't seem to be doing anything. Do I need a reboot for it to work > like I am guessing based on #4 above? I don't see any similar problem on machines upgraded to Centos5.3 that are monitored with (and running) OpenNMS, so I'd guess that since you didn't change your snmpd.conf settings it is MRTG-specific. And btw: OpenNMS might be overkill for your purpose, but you might want to take a look: http://www.opennms.org. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com