Fedora as network managment system

[ltodd2]

Afternoon

I am just installing fedora 8 onto an IBM server to use as a network monitor. I've been looking at Nagio and openNMS am am not sure which is best. Does anyone out there have any input? im also going to use mrtg with rrdtools and router2 if I can ever get it to work. Only ever used it on windows but it was slow and maxed the cpu out. Been told runs better on linux.

On the selecting of the packages I sore xen and kvm, I was thinking about using visualization and running different systems but have never used it. Is one better than the other? Can either run (hate to say it) windows?

If anyone has setup a NMS box can you let me know what us used.

I have also been looking for some software to do the same job that cisco works can do as in connecting to devices, pulling off the configs and sw etc each night if changes have been made. Be an inventory for all the hardware. At the moment I have it all in a spreadsheet and its a pain in the arse.
Suggestions welcome please

On a different note, I use windows on my work laptop and would love to get rid. My problem is we use ad etc. I have played around and Lotus notes can be run in wine or I can use the native linux version, my big problem is things like mmc's for ad admin etc, visio as i have not seen a good alternative. I have tried mmc in wine with no joy. Anyone got any ways round this. I dont want to have to use vnc or rdp to a server to run them if possible.

Thanks in advance

Lee

[ibbo]

SNMP is the best there is (IMHO).

You can put snmp on all your managed machines and use the one machine as a management station to poll the others. You can put to gether your own ASN.1 files to create your own MIB's (got a router thats not polling then write your own mib). In English that means you can pretty much create your own management driver for a peice of hardware if you need to.

I have not been into network management for a good 5 years but this was the standard back then.

Of course back then I used Tkined (which seems to be dead these days) which was a bloody good gui (considering it was free). It could do IP and snmp monitoring (to name a few) and was quite easy to use.

SNMP comes with some shell utils like GET, GETBULK, WALK etc that can poll MIB's of other hosts returing say how much IP traffic has passed through a specific node.

You can make your own gui these days by using the internet (a management station accessible from anywhere now we are talking true network management). However it takes some knowledge of the ins and outs of snmp and its relative usage within your web app and its abnility to reach your requirements.

PERL has a good snmp module and used along with gtk you can get some cool things going on.
PHP comes with snmp abilities (limited or they used to be) and a fair few apps have been put together using it.

Give me a shout if you want to probe snmp further.

Ibbo

[drunkahol]

Nagios is a comprehensive monitoring tool. You can write your own scripts to probe pretty much anything you want.

As ibbo says, SNMP is the standard language for monitoring. Your Nagios scripts can use this method without any issue.

Xen or KVM? Xen is more mature at this point. I wouldn't push my description any further though. They use different methods to attain virtualisation. Xen can run Windows in full virtualisation mode if you have the Intel VT or AMD Pacifica enabled CPU'd. Don't know enough about KVM yet.

The last place I worked had a system whereby the router configs were all probed on a regular basis (think it was every 3 hours). The resulting text files would be stored in CVS or Subversion and any diffs immediately reported. The repository was also backed up with NetBackup. Worked very well, except it had admin passwords splattered all over the code etc. Not very secure, so we junked it. It was replaced with . . . well . . . nothing unfortunately.

Cheers

Duncan

[ltodd2]

Thanks for the info.

Have a good new year