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The SNMP & MRTG Adventure
For the last week or so I’ve been working on getting all of my important network devices mapped and graphed using a popular piece of software called MRTG. It uses information provided by an SNMP daemon, which is installed on each device to be monitored.

The nice thing about it was that devices didn’t have to be local to the server with MRTG installed on it. That meant I could monitor devices in 2 or 3 or a million different locations.

My list of devices consisted of 1 Xserve, 1 Gentoo Linux server, 1 Airport Extreme and a Linksys WRT54GS.

Configuring SNMP on Gentoo was quite easy, but doing it on the rest of the devices was a little bit harder. Gentoo just required me to emerge net-snmp and it was good to go. I found some good links which helped me a lot, and that I have to share with you:

Xserve SNMP: Todd Daily
Apple KB Article
Apple Discussion Board Thread

Airport Extreme: I typed something like cfgmaker password@ip_address >Airport.cfg on the box running MRTG while in /etc/mrtg/ and that worked pretty good for me.

The Linksys never ended up working because of it’s location and how ports are blocked, so that got scratched from being monitored.

There was a funny post I came across while browsing and some guy thought SNMP was a mail protocol and seemed very sure about it. He was like, “Yeah, SNMP, the MP is Mail Protocol…”. Yeah ok buddy!! I think he was thinking about SMTP…wanker.

Here’s a pretty good link for doing MRTG:
Advanced MRTG For Linux

So now, everything is almost complete, there is still a couple things that are being worked on, but it’s a great way to monitor network devices. It’s also pretty easy!!

Oh yeah SNMP works on port 161 if you’re doing remote monitoring. SNMP works on port 514. Enjoy!