Snmp on Aaron's Worthless Words

Getting Temperature Data from a 6500 via SNMP

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I apologize to my adoring fans (both of you) for the lack of posting. I’m in the middle of moving, buying a new house, selling my current house, getting a mortgage, etc. I’ve up until 11:30 nearly every night filling out forms and going through red tape. Don’t get me started on getting money from a 401k! Anyway…

I got in this morning, and a coworker was telling me that the data center’s HVAC was crippled due to an oil leak, and it was 90F in there. D’oh! It wasn’t quite that high, but it was warm. Luckily, all of our network gear is on the end of the rows with AC, so we’re safe, but it got me thinking about monitoring temperature of our 6500s via SNMP. I’ve done it via Cacti, but I never really looked how to do it manually.

Is That a Bandwidth Graph or a Polygraph?

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I thought I’d throw an easy one out before taking off for the holiday. Merry Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, Saturnia, etc., to all.

A few years ago, I was looking through some Cacti graphs of gigabit trunks between 6500s and noticed an abrupt change in traffic. The graphs were nice and smooth at around 135Mpbs until, seemingly randomly, they just started going wild. It seriously looked like a lie detector from the movies; I saw spikes up to 140Mbps in one sample and 2Mpbs the next sample for days and days. I looked around to see if anything weird was going on somewhere on the network, but I didn’t find anything.

Free and Awesome Network Tools

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

We all have limited budgets these days. Long gone are the days of unlimited resources and uncontrollable expansion of the network, so it’s important that any network dude or dudette pay attention to the open-source world. Below is a list of stuff I use at the office and at home to monitor, trend, and alert the network. All this stuff is free and runs on Linux to save even more cash.

Monitoring the CSM with SNMP

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I had an article a few weeks ago about the Cisco CSM, which is a load-balancer module for the 6500 series switches. This thing is a pretty good device, but monitoring the connections to each VIP and RIP is not very straightforward. If you have an SNMP monitoring system like Cacti or MRTG, you need to know the OID to monitor, but it doesn’t work like anything else in the world.

SNMP v3 is Easy!

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I finally got around to looking into [tag]SNMP[/tag] v3 and was shocked at how easy it actually is. When I first looked up info on it so many moons ago, I saw table after tables of views and privilege levels and thought I would have to put in a billion hours getting it customized. I settled down and went through some Google results and found a blog post by Richard Bejtlich that shows the simplest of configurations. Works like a champ!