Re: What's Up Gold?

Wesley Brown wrote:
>I have a question that stems from my attempt to try What's Up Gold on my one Windows box. Anyway, it sounded
>like good software and I thought I could monitor my Smootwall
firewall, my router, my wireless router, my
>apple computer, and my two linux boxes. Well, I found out in the
process that it only works on a windows
>network and that it uses SNMP for discovery.
>
>Two questions... Is there anything that is GUI based for Linux and/or Windows that will map my network?
>And, I have a very small understanding of SNMP with my experience with Cisco routers. So, when I tried
>to discover my network it asked for my SNMP root device. If I had a
Cisco router I would be good but I
>don't so what would my SNMP root device be? Can small routers like
Linksys and D-link function as a SNMP
>device, what about my Smoothwall? Do I need a DNS server on my
network? I guess that is more than two
>questions :)
>
> Wesley Brown

Wesley,

First I think a quick introduction to snmp is in order. SNMP is a
protocol that allows for common access to information on network
devices. I call this information attributes. Each device will have a
list of snmp attributes that you can query. Some of these are very
common such as the hostname or uptime, and other attributes may be very
specific to the device such as the routing table or what not. You can
query attributes by OID (object ID) or by name. This works kinda like
DNS, but instead of a server to resolve the name to numbers, snmp uses mibs.

Here is a quick and dirty sample query (watch out of line wrap):

$ snmpget -v 1 -c <top secret> <ip address> system.sysDescr.0
system.sysDescr.0 : DISPLAY STRING- (ascii): 3Com Corporation HiPer
Access Router Card Built on Feb 16 1999 at 12:42:34.

$ snmpget -v 1 -c <top secret> <ip address> system.sysUpTime.0
system.sysUpTime.0 : Timeticks: (1220243141) 141 days, 5:33:51.41

YUCK!!! It's a 3com!!!

The Net-snmp daemon for unix will allow you to map information to snmp
attributes such as the available disk space network interfaces and you
can even make custom attributes and tie them to scripts.

I don't know what this "root device" term means for this software, but
in openview you can "seed" the network detection by defining a couple of
routers and openview will use snmp to download the routing tables and
discover other network devices by sending snmp queries to the next hop
and downloading the next devices routing table.

SNMP doesn't need dns to work, but some detection products use it to
name the device that it finds if there isn't useful naming information
in the devices snmp table.

I haven't seen that many small devices with snmp support so I don't know
if your small routers will work, but you can use snmp collection with
net-snmp to collect uptime, interfaces, disk space, and other valuable
information about your servers.

The snmp agents that most servers come with allow you to monitor the
RAID array, temp, fans, and many other hardware parameters.

HTH,

schu

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Received on Tue Jun 29 18:28:19 2004