Hi,
If I might contribute......
> > 2. The modularization boundary should be a MIB. Rather than tailor
> > snips to read /proc directly, it would be better to manufacture a client
> > app that translates /proc data into SNMP MIB format. (there have been
> > some efforts in this regard previously, but I don't have a trace).
>
> that's what SNMP agent does.
>
> and snmpmon and it's collector garter that data. It's slightly broken, but the base code is there waiting for somebody to fix.
> no custom sotfware needs to be installed on the hosts.
> Designed to work for hosts with Net-SNMP installed like Solaris or Linux and Windows (with snmp enabled), and AFAIK for ciscos.
>
>
I disagree that SNMP is the way to go for servers.
For portability and extensibility I think the way hostmon is
doing things currently is a good way to go about it. While for some
companies loading something like Perl onto a machine is not allowed, I
think this is preferable over SNMP. SNMP needs to be bound to a port
< 1024 which means you need to be root to start it. It also means
that exploits will potentially have root access.
Doing things the way that they currently are, using Perl with
shells out to system provided binaries means that as long as base perl
is installed, and the base OS is installed, that the client will work.
Leaving it on the port it currently is (5355) also means it can be
started by a user with a uid/gid that does not have to include root.
If we were to go SNMP, there becomes the issue of the SNMP itself,
and the MIBs, and its portability across platforms. If we were to specify
a certain one, we would be forcing people to use something that they might
need another SNMP client on instead. We also can not be guaranteed that the
agents available on the target platform have the extensibility we would want.
If they do, then we would have to program towards that.
I think on networking equipment SNMP works great, but for systems
I think the current Perl/system utils is the way to go.
Tuc/TTSG Internet Services, Inc.
(PS - Besides, I multiply my load by 100 and change my refresh
down to 4 minutes... And I know how to do that in perl. ;) )
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