Re: [Devmon] Devmon snmp v3

[Buchan M. <bg...@st...>]

On Thursday, 25 March 2010 15:22:59 mario andre wrote:
> Hi Buchan, How are you?
> 
> I will start to try a patch in order to devmon support snmp v3, Do you have
> any hint on what files change?

The biggest problem is that SNMP_Session doesn't have SNMPv3 support.

The funny thing is that SNMP_Session is by the MRTG people, but they seem to 
have abandoned it from a maintenance point of view, and they have hacked 
SNMPv3 support into MRTG using some other modules, when it would have made 
more sense to add it to SNMP_Session.

The other question here is whether we should consider switching SNMP modules, 
to Net::SNMP (which seems to be a fork or alternative to SNMP_Session), which 
already has SNMPv3 support, or SNMP (from the net-snmp project) which has 
SNMPv3 support as well as MIB parsing support.

Maybe for now we should just investigate how much effort it is to switch to a 
different SNMP module without any new features. While I would really like MIB 
parsing (which would reduce the amount of effort in supporting new devices), 
there are disadvantages (people need to have all the MIB files) and requiring 
net-snmp could be a limiting factor for people on proprietary unix systems 
(though for linux distros it shouldn't be an issue ... and I always run devmon 
on linux myself).

> or If the best way is to do like MRTG and
> create in devmon.cfg a flag to enable v3? In bbhosts you think should be a
> good way to put a user/password definition?

I think we could treat SNMPv3 credentials similarly to SNMPv1/v2c community 
names, by allowing a list of default usernames/passwords etc. in the 
devmon.cfg, but also allow per-host overrides in bb-hosts (for now).

> You are interested in work together?

Of course. I would very much like to see SNMPv3 support in devmon, but it is 
not personally my highest priority (for work purposes, where e.g. MIB parsing, 
and better SNMP trap management in Xymon are more urgent). So, I welcome any 
assistance.

For now it might be best for you to work from an svn checkout of trunk, and 
send me the output of (e.g.) 'svn diff' or similar. Once we have something in 
progress we can consider if you want svn commit access, or whether I commit 
your changes.

I will try and assist you where necessary, but for now I won't have time to 
actually work on the actual SNMPv3 support directly.

BTW, we may also want to start documenting some of our plans on the wiki ... I 
actually have a bit of a roadmap I should put there. If you're interested, it 
is at http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/devmon/ . Let me know if you can 
edit there, if not I might have to add you to the project.



Regards,
Buchan