I've received some complaints about my posts or the recent lack thereof. Let me just recap what has been going on since the last time. I've been together with my sparkling new girlfriend for about 3 weeks now. Nothing to report.. Everything is well. We went to see Dark Water last week. It blows chunks! Don't waste your money on it (I apologize if you already did and I posted this too late). I bought a new cellphone since my Nokia has been dropping it's connection a few times per week. I got a Sony Ericsson (t630) with camera and large color screen for a rather low price. The headset I bought for my first cell phone (also an Ericsson) worked excellent. Bright (patented idea) of the week: Access a database through SNMP calls. Set an OID to an SQL query and perform a GET on an OID sequence for the result. Plans for next years YAPC::Eu. Write an SNMP Event List, explain how traps are sent, received, parsed, explain how OID polling is done, handled, etc. Work has been a pain at moments.. but I don't have regrets yet. I'm going sailing this weekend with some friends and family... It will be lots of fun! My CMS made some small but nice progress during the past 2 weeks or so. I just added another template, I fixed some features and cleaned the layout a bit. Mental Note: Provide a command line based tool to do site management (manage the CMS from command line, export to XML or SQL, import from XML or SQL,..). It shouldn't be TOO hard with Mech.
On a work related note: It isn't THAT difficult to access Netcool Object Server in Perl using DBD::Sybase, DBI and FreeTDS. Most of the specs are described on the Netcool Users site.
Re:SNMP?
Beatnik on 2005-10-06T15:58:09
In short, what is SNMP: SNMP is a protocol that can be used to manage network devices (hence: Simple Network Management Protocol).
For instance, you can poll the system load of a Cisco Router, request the active connections on a firewall, query the database state of an Oracle server, read the route or interface table of a Juniper Router. As a hardware manufacturar, you design a tree in which you store information about your device. Tools like, for instance, MRTG can poll the status of your device and generate graphs and reports on it. In larger setups, SNMP is used in combination with fscking expensive software in which you can define all kinds of thresholds. For instance, mail person X if router Y has an average processor load of 95% over the past hour. As an ordinary Joe, you can design your own tree (actually called a MIB tree), in which you can store any kind of data you want. A server process handles SNMP requests and responds with data. The server can retrieve that data from your system (e.g. CPU Load, Swap space, free disk space, etc) or it can pass on the control to a script or application. If you have a fish tank and you hook up a thermometer to your computer and can read out the temperature, you can easily request the water temperature through an SNMP call. You can practically request any kind of data.
Like I posted in my journal entry, it shouldn't be TOO hard to send an SQL query to my SNMP server and get the results back. SNMP is mainly used for reporting, monitoring and management.
Net-SNMP comes with a whole bunch of Unix dists and compiles easily for those that don't have it out of the box.
Browseable MIB Tree.. This one is pretty cool.
Why should you care? If you're not in the Network Management business, I can't think of any reason why you should care. SNMP can be a fun thing to play with.. and big bucks are made in network management.
