MRTG and Novell NetWare 5.1/6.0

I have had good success in tracking various items with the MRTG package and Novell NetWare 5.1/6.0

Example pages:
Tracking CPU performance
Tracking Used-Blocks per volume (keep it over 10% free if you use sub-allocation!)

Basics

Certain SNMP metrics are enabled by default in NetWare 5.1 and up, and most likely NetWare 5.0 as well.  Reportedly, these metrics were only to be had with ManageWise NLM's in the NW4.11 days.  No special setup on the NetWare server is required, beyond setting the SNMP community-string.

The basic MRTG package and cfgmaker will correctly identify the interfaces bound on the Novell server. Each Lan-board+FrameType combination is its own interface, so ETHERNET_802.2 and ETHERNET_802.3 are separate interfaces as far as MRTG is concerned. The general MRTG documentation describes how to set that up, so I'm not going to.

There is a MIB that NW5.1 has, located at SYS:System\NMA\MIBS that goes into a lot of this. Pair this with the free GetIF SNMP utility, and you can find all sorts of neat stuff.

MRTG is designed to track inbound/outbound traffic.  In order to measure the top two items, you need to specify two SNMP OID's to track.  This is done like so:

Target[CHA_CPU1]: 1.3.6.1.2.1.25.3.3.1.2.1&1.3.6.1.2.1.25.3.3.1.2.1:public@172.17.202.16
Tracking CPU in a single-CPU system requires that both OID's be the same.  However, if you have two CPU's in a system, the format changes slightly:
Target[SNOOPY_CPU1]: 1.3.6.1.2.1.25.3.3.1.2.1&1.3.6.1.2.1.25.3.3.1.2.2:public@172.17.202.17
This will give a graph that has "Inbound" as CPU0, and "Outbound" as CPU1.

CPU Tracking
Used-Block Tracking

Dynamic update of pages

I've recently had the need to create a method to dynamically track changes to my system. We have put in a cluster recently, and one of the things I've done is to set up mrtg-graphs for each of the separate services.  Since a service may move from node to node in the cluster, what cfgmaker returns for server-name can change from day to day. I needed a way to keep the text next to the graphs to be as accurate as possible.

One of the recent improvements to MRTG is the addition of format templates for creating customized output from cfgmaker. This is a very valuable tool in creating cfg-files dynamically. This lead to the creation of a pair of batchfiles, one to run MRTG so that config-file updates were parsed, and a second to generate the config-files themselves.

Dynamic Update of Pages


Last reviewed 04/15/2004