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asking about MIB structure of SNMP agent running on various type of Solaris, HP-UX and Windows

Mulyadi Santosa [mulyadi.santosa at gmail.com]


Wed, 9 Jul 2008 17:03:12 +0700

Hello gang!

As the subject says, I have hard times understanding the result of snmpwalk against those platforms. Not that I can't query those nodes, but snmpwalk is unable to translate the numeric form of OID into human readable string label.

More precisely, I need to find the MIB files that describe the returned SNMP data. So far, my best bet is by referring to oidview.com, but the MIB files I have downloaded from this site don't always work as expected i.e some OIDs are still in numeric form, thus I don't whether it refers to disk usage, cpu utilization and so on.

I will highly appreciate any inputs regarding this issue.

regards,

Mulyadi.


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Ben Okopnik [ben at linuxgazette.net]


Wed, 9 Jul 2008 08:19:23 -0400

On Wed, Jul 09, 2008 at 05:03:12PM +0700, Mulyadi Santosa wrote:

> Hello gang!
> 
> As the subject says, I have hard times understanding the result of
> snmpwalk against those platforms. Not that I can't query those nodes,
> but snmpwalk is unable to translate the numeric form of OID into human
> readable string label.
> 
> More precisely, I need to find the MIB files that describe the
> returned SNMP data. So far, my best bet is by referring to
> oidview.com, but the MIB files I have downloaded from this site don't
> always work as expected i.e some OIDs are still in numeric form, thus
> I don't whether it refers to disk usage, cpu utilization and so on.
> 
> I will highly appreciate any inputs regarding this issue.

The MIBs are just plain text files. Have you looked at the ones you have to ensure that they actually describe/cover the OID you're interested in? The structure is certainly supposed to be OS- and whatever else independent; that's the whole point of SNMP.

-- 
* Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET *


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Breen Mullins [breen.mullins at gmail.com]


Wed, 9 Jul 2008 09:22:41 -0700

On Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 5:19 AM, Ben Okopnik <ben@linuxgazette.net> wrote:

>
> The MIBs are just plain text files. Have you looked at the ones you have
> to ensure that they actually describe/cover the OID you're interested
> in? The structure is certainly supposed to be OS- and whatever else
> independent; that's the whole point of SNMP.
>

The trick is usually getting the appropriate MIB in the first place.

If the objects you're looking for begin with the OID prefix .1.3.6.1.4.1, they're under the vendor's enterprise tree and you'll have to get the MIB file from the vendor.

Vendor support for that is spotty at best - you may have to be persistent. (Good luck!)

-- 
Breen Mullins
Menlo Park, Calif.


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Mulyadi Santosa [mulyadi.santosa at gmail.com]


Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:45:08 +0700

Hi..

On Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 11:22 PM, Breen Mullins <breen.mullins@gmail.com> wrote:

> The trick is usually getting the appropriate MIB in the first place.
>
> If the objects you're looking for begin with the OID prefix
> .1.3.6.1.4.1, they're
> under the vendor's enterprise tree and you'll have to get the MIB file from
> the vendor.

Hmm...and as far as I can tell, local vendor in Indonesia can't help me much for this issue. Either they are confused which MIB related to a platform, or the worst....they don't know what I am talking about :(

But I am curious for one thing, if an snmp agent is running on certain machine, can I safely assume that MIB file exists in that machine too? Is there any common place to find for that MIB, let's say something like /var/snmp/mib?

regards,

Mulyadi.


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Neil Youngman [ny at youngman.org.uk]


Thu, 10 Jul 2008 09:55:22 +0100

On Thursday 10 July 2008 09:45, Mulyadi Santosa wrote:

> But I am curious for one thing, if an snmp agent is running on certain
> machine, can I safely assume that MIB file exists in that machine too?
> Is there any common place to find for that MIB, let's say something
> like /var/snmp/mib?

I would suggest 2 things

1. find /usr /var /opt -xdev -iname \*.mib

you may need to vary that to make sure it covers all partitions that might contain the mib

2. Google for solaris snmpd mib

Obviously replace Solaris with any other OS of interest. Google suggests http://docs.sun.com/source/816-2014/man8/snmpd.8.html and that says

FILES
 
The following files are provided for agent operation:
 
snmpd
    agent binary snmpd.conf configuration information (described below) 
 
sun-snmp.schema
    SNM schema generated by mib2schema utility from MIB 
 
sun.mib
    Sun-specific MIB in ASN.1 format 

HTH

Neil


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Ben Okopnik [ben at linuxgazette.net]


Thu, 10 Jul 2008 12:37:12 -0400

On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 03:45:08PM +0700, Mulyadi Santosa wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 11:22 PM, Breen Mullins <breen.mullins@gmail.com> wrote:
> > The trick is usually getting the appropriate MIB in the first place.
> >
> > If the objects you're looking for begin with the OID prefix
> > .1.3.6.1.4.1, they're
> > under the vendor's enterprise tree and you'll have to get the MIB file from
> > the vendor.

Mulyadi's mentioned http://www.oidview.com/ ; there's also http://www.mibdepot.com/ (more than 1.25M object definitions available.) Or you could just write your own and fill it in with the data you have - or modify an existing similar one.

> Hmm...and as far as I can tell, local vendor in Indonesia can't help
> me much for this issue. Either they are confused which MIB related to
> a platform, or the worst....they don't know what I am talking about :(

Again, I think you're hunting for something that doesn't exist - which may be why they don't know what you're talking about. MIBs, as far as I know, have nothing to do with any platform - they're just device descriptions.

> But I am curious for one thing, if an snmp agent is running on certain
> machine, can I safely assume that MIB file exists in that machine too?

Nope. They should be, but there's nothing to guarantee it.

> Is there any common place to find for that MIB, let's say something
> like /var/snmp/mib?

On my system, /usr/share/snmp/mibs contains a bunch of MIBs. However, I don't think that this is necessarily where the new ones would always get installed.

-- 
* Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET *


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Breen Mullins [breen.mullins at gmail.com]


Thu, 10 Jul 2008 11:11:51 -0700

On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 1:45 AM, Mulyadi Santosa <mulyadi.santosa@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi..
>
>
> Hmm...and as far as I can tell, local vendor in Indonesia can't help
> me much for this issue. Either they are confused which MIB related to
> a platform, or the worst....they don't know what I am talking about :(

Neither case is at all uncommon. You typically need to reach a specialized support person, or better yet, an engineer, to find somebody who understands SNMP.

> But I am curious for one thing, if an snmp agent is running on certain
> machine, can I safely assume that MIB file exists in that machine too?
> Is there any common place to find for that MIB, let's say something
> like /var/snmp/mib?

The MIB file is just a description of how the software agent on the device works. There isn't any actual MIB in the device itself. You certainly can't assume that the vendor has thought to install a MIB along with an agent.

What device are we talking about? And what is the numeric OID you're interested in?

-- 
Breen Mullins
Menlo Park, Calif.


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Mulyadi Santosa [mulyadi.santosa at gmail.com]


Fri, 11 Jul 2008 12:37:19 +0700

Hi!

First of all, thanks to all of you who had answered....

On Fri, Jul 11, 2008 at 1:11 AM, Breen Mullins <breen.mullins@gmail.com> wrote:

> Neither case is at all uncommon. You typically need to reach a specialized
> support person, or better yet, an engineer, to find somebody who understands
> SNMP.

I'll see what I can do about it. I suppose I can bug somebody from HP Indonesia (again).

> The MIB file is just a description of how the software agent on the
> device works.
> There isn't any actual MIB in the device itself. You certainly can't
> assume that
> the vendor has thought to install a MIB along with an agent.

I slowly realize this fact...which brings me into further deeper headache......

> What device are we talking about? And what is the numeric OID you're interested
> in?

Servers....they are running Solaris ( ver 5 up to 10), HP-UX (version 11), Windows NT/2000/XP/2003, Linux.. list could grows in the future.

For the OID, I am focusing on 4 aspects: disk, CPU, memory and traffic. So for example, I need CPU utilization (% of time spent in user, kernel time) and processor queue length.

To the best I know, looks like querying the traffic information is the easiest...because it is the same for all platform. But when it comes to processor or disk or memory....OID can be different....

Any further hints are greatly appreciated.

regards,

Mulyadi.


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