Installing SNMP Agents

A.1 Windows 2000/XP

NOte: Depending on which other network components are installed on the system, the original Windows 2000/XP CD/installation media may be requested by the install process.

Note: According to Microsoft Knowledge Base article, SNMP counters for storage devices (including physical and virtual memory) on Windows 2000 are not dynamically updated. Please refer to http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q295/5/87.ASP for additional information.

To install an SNMP Agent on a Windows2000/XP Server:
Click on Start | Settings | Control Panel.
Double-click on Add/Remove Programs.
Click on Add/Remove Windows Components.
Click on Management and Monitoring Tools and click on Details.
Check Simple Network Management Protocol and click OK.
Click on Next and let the install process complete.
Double-click on Administrative Tools (inside Control Panel).
Double-click on Computer Management.
Expand the Services and Applications tree on the left frame.
Click on Services on the left frame.
Locate SNMP Service on right frame and double-click on it.
On the General tab, select Automatic for Startup Type.
On the Security tab, click on Add... for Accepted community names.
Leave Community Rights to Read-Only and pick a secure Community Name. Click on OK.

NOTE Remember this name, as this information will be required to configure your Win2000 machine as a NetVigil device.

Click on OK again and close the Computer Management and Control Panel windows.

For additional reference, please refer to: http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q237/2/95.ASP

To configure Windows NT 4.0 machine for SNMP monitoring:

Follow the same steps as above for Windows 2000. Minor differences may exist in the operating systems, so please refer to: http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q237/2/95.ASP for the most recent information.

A.2 Linux x86

SNMP Agent for different Linux distributions are available from respective vendor. You can search for a version suitable for your distribution at http://www.rpmfind.net/ or use a pre-compiled binary available at support.fidelia.com.

A.3 Solaris Version 2.6 or Higher

Note that the Solaris agent only includes support for MIB-II tree, which will enable you to monitor the network interfaces on the server. Since the agent does not support HOST-MIB tree, NetVigil will not be able to find any disks or CPU. Also note that this agent only support SNMP version 1, so when creating a new device, make sure to select version 1 on the device creation page on the web interface.

In order to take full advantage of server monitoring features of NetVigil, an SNMP agent with HOST-MIB support is highly recommended. The most widely used freeware agent available is NET-SNMP (formerly known as UCD-SNMP) which is available from http://www.net-snmp.org. Alternatively, please contact Fidelia Support to explore other options.

The SNMP agent shipped with Solaris 2.6 is known to contain certain bugs and Sun recommends downloading and installing the latest Solstice Enterprise Agent from http://www.sun.com/software/entagents/download/. The package includes instruction on how to uninstall the existing agent first.

The following config entries for /etc/snmp/conf/snmpd.conf should be sufficient to get basic information from the agent:

#---------------------------------------
sysdescr															My Server
system-group-read-community															public
read-community															public
trap															localhost
trap-community															SNMP-trap
managers															localhost
#--------------------------------------- 

A.4 Pre-compiled SNMP agents

Pre-compiled snmp agent for Linux and Solaris are available for download at http://support.fidelia.com/downloads/netvigil/snmp-agent/. After downloading the appropriate archive, to install the agent perform following steps:

To install a pre-compiled SNMP agent:
Extract the archive using gunzip -c snmpd-<os>-<version>.tar.gz | tar xvf -
Copy snmpd and snmpd.conf to a suitable directory.
Edit snmpd.conf and change the community string from public to something more secure.
The supplied option should be sufficient to get the agent working. If you would like to add any additional configuration options, details are available at http://www.net-snmp.org/man/snmpd.conf.html.
Start the agent using ./snmpd -c snmpd.conf as root.