mrose@cheetah.ca.psi.com (Marshall Rose) (05/26/91)
Archive-name: internet/snmp/unix-mib/1991-05-24
Archive: venera.isi.edu:/mib/unix [128.9.0.32]
Original-posting-by: mrose@cheetah.ca.psi.com (Marshall Rose)
Original-subject: We can name that tune in 26 objects... system management
Reposted-by: emv@msen.com (Edward Vielmetti, MSEN)
Several of the SNMP principals were discussing the OSF DME at the recent
IFIP 6.6 Symposium on network management and were considering how difficult it
would be to accomplish the OSF goals for DME using the SNMP. The emminent
Prof. Case observed that "it's just more MIB variables" which piqued my
curiosity.
Since the SNMP modus operandi has always tempered all proposals through
implementation experience, I created an implementation which will be found in
the next beta release of ISODE. The implementation goes beyond proof of
concept and may be useful to managers of Unix systems--it will let them use
the same friendly and powerful tools for monitoring and controlling their Unix
hosts that they are already successfully using for monitoring and controlling
their network devices.
Of course, I did not implement all of the possible objects only those which
are most important to me: 26 objects to deal with user administration and
printing queues. When defining new objects, the trick is to be able to
define the minimal set of objects for useful management.
The current system management objects have been aded to the UNIX MIB which is
available on venera.isi.edu in the public mib/ area.
On the agent side:
The agent supports the MIB, with full read/write access, depending on the
authorization permissions associated with the manager's community. This means
you can:
- examine/add/lock/remove users and groups
- examine/start/stop/enable/disable/abort/clean printer queues
- examine/remove/reschedule printer jobs
The particular linkage to the agent is achieved via a SMUX peer. (For people
in the past who've asked questions about how to write SMUX peers that do
sets, the code supplied provides an good example.) The agent-side support for
the MIB is for BSD UNIX systems. SysV people will have to roll their own
(but this is pretty straight-forward).
On the manager side:
You can either use a command line interface like snmpi. In addition, two
snmp-capable gawk scripts have been written, so you can do
s-netstat -u
to look at users, and
s-netstat -p
to look at print queues. An example is below.
Further, fans of snmp-capable gawk will be happy to know that it now supports
the SNMP set operation. So you can get full read/write access to SNMP via a
gawk script.
All of this stuff is running now (of course), and will be in the next ISODE
beta release, due out in a few weeks. So, system management via SNMP is
openly-available, if you so choose!
/mtr
ps: Here's that example I promised:
% s-netstat -p
Name Status Jobs Remarks
ps Q+P+D+ 1 status: busy; source: AppleTalk
Rank Owner Job Files Total Size
active mrose 711 comments.ps 81959 bytes
pps: here's a portion of the gawk script that got invoked:
...
BEGIN {
...
didone = 0;
for (i in printQName) {
if (didone)
printf "\n";
else {
printf "%-8s %-6s %-4s %s\n",
"Name",
"Status",
"Jobs",
"Remarks";
didone = 1;
}
printf "%-8s %-6s %4d %s\n",
printQName,
pq_flags(printQStatus),
printQEntries,
printQDisplay;
x = split (i, instance, ".") + 1;
didentries = 0;
for (j in printJRank, i) {
if (split (j, instance, ".") != x)
break;
if (didentries == 0) {
printf "%-6s %-10s %-3s %-37s %s\n",
"Rank",
"Owner",
"Job",
"Files",
"Total Size";
didentries = 1;
}
printf "%-6s %-10s %-3s %-37s %d bytes\n",
pj_rank(printJRank),
pj_owner(printJOwner),
substr(printJName, 4, 3),
printJDescription,
printJSize;
}
}
if (!didone && DIAGNOSTIC)
printf "print: %s\n", DIAGNOSTIC;
}
-- comp.archives file verification
venera.isi.edu
-rw-rw-r-- 1 1216 104 23747 May 23 23:16 /mib/unix
found unix-mib ok
venera.isi.edu:/mib/unix