Combining net-SNMP and SUNWmasf on Solaris

2008-01-01 00:00:00

In some cases you're going to want to use Net-SNMP on your Solaris hosts, while still being able to monitor Sun-specific SNMP objects. It took me a while to get all of this to work and it's a bit of a puzzle, but here's how to make it work.

In our current environment at $CLIENT we want to standardise all of our UNIX hosts to the Net-SNMP agent software. This will allow us to use a configuration file which can be at least 60% identical on each host, making life just a little bit easier for all of us. Unfortunately Net-SNMP isn't equipped to deal with all of Sun's specific SNMP objects, so we're going to have to make a few big modifications to the software.

Of course packaging all these changes into one big .PKG is the nicest way of ensuring that all required changes are made in one blow, so that's what I've done. Unfortunately I cannot share this package with you, since it contains quite a large amount of $CLIENT internal information. I may be tempted at another time to recreate a non-$CLIENT version of the package that can be used elsehwere.


Re-compiling Net-SNMP

The latest versions of Net-SNMP comes with experimental LM_Sensors support for Sun hardware. Oddly, I've found that you need to drop one version below the latest version to get it to work nicely with Solaris 8. So here's the steps to take...

  1. Download the source code for Net-SNMP version 5.2.3 from their website.
  2. Move the .TGZ to your build system and unpack it in your regular build location. Also, building Net-SNMP successfully requires OpenSSL 0.9.7g or higher, so make sure that it's installed on your build system.
  3. Run the configure script with the following options:

    --with-mib-modules="host disman/event-mib ucd-snmp/diskio smux agentx disman/event-mib ucd-snmp/lmSensors" --with-perl-module

  4. Run "make", "make test" and "make install" to complete the creation of Net-SNMP. If "make test" fails on every check, it is likely that your system is unable to find the requisite OpenSSL libraries. This may be solved by running:

    /usr/bin/crle -c /var/ld/ld.config -l /lib:/usr/lib:/usr/local/lib:/usr/local/ssl/lib

  5. After "make install" has finished all the Net-SNMP files have been installed on your build system. Naturally it's important to know which files to include in your package. To help you, I've created a list of the files that are installed.

Installing SUNWmasf and its components

PLEASE NOTE: SUNWmasf will currently (july of 2006) only get useful results on the following models: V210, V240, V250, V440, V1280, E2900, N210, N240, N440, N1280. On other systems you may have more luck using the LM_Sensors pieces of Net-SNMP. They have been tested to work on E450, V880 and 280R.

As I mentioned earlier Net-SNMP with LM_Sensors can only gather limited amounts of Sun specific information. That's besides the fact that it is also still an experimental feature. So we're going to need an alternative SNMP agent to gather more information for us. Enter the SUNWmasf package.

SUNWmasf and its components may be downloaded from the Sun Microsystems website. Either use this direct link (which may be subject to change), or go to www.sun.com/download and search for "Sun SNMP Management Agent".

You can opt to install SUNWmasf manually on each of your clients, but it would be much nicer to include it into your custom made package. To have a full list of all the files and symlinks that you should include, you can take a peek at the prototype file I made for the package. It includes all the files required for Net-SNMP.

Installation of the software couldn't be easier. Just run the following command, after extracting the .TAR.Z file that contains SUNWmasf.

pkgadd -d . SUNWescdl SUNWescfl SUNWeschl SUNWescnl SUNWescpl SUNWmasf SUNWmasfr


Configuring SUNWmasf

Go into /etc/opt/SUNWmasf/conf and replace the snmpd.conf file with the following:

rocommunity public

agentaddress 1161

agentuser daemon

agentgroup daemon


Configuring Net-SNMP

The configuration file for Net-SNMP is located in /usr/local/share/snmp. You will need to make a whole bunch of changes over here that I won't cover, like security ACLs, SNMP trap hosts and bunches of other stuff. However, you _will_ need to add the following lines to allow Net-SNMP to talk to SUNWmasf.

proxy -c public localhost:1161 .1.3.6.1.4.1.42

proxy -c public localhost:1161 .1.3.6.1.2.1.47


Starting the software

Since SUNWmasf relies upon Net-SNMP, it will need to be started after that piece of software. The prototype file I mentioned earlier already takes this into account, but if you're not going to use it just make sure that /etc/init.d/masfd gets called _after_ /etc/init.d/snmpd during the boot process.

Also, I've noticed that SUNWmasf will need about thirty seconds before it can be read using commands like snmpget and snmpwalk.


Reading values from the agents

As you may well know, SNMP is a tangly web of numerical identifiers. I will make a nice overview of the various useful OIDs that you can use for monitoring through both LM_Sensors and SUNWmasf. However, I will put these in a seperate document, since it falls outside the scope of this mini-howto.


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