RE: (ASCEND) Navis cost too much

[MyLink Admin <Admin@mylink.net>]

Snmp walking a max 40xx every 20 seconds may not be too good of an idea.  Its slow and eats up cpu resources which are already scarce at peak loads.  The easiest alternative is to just turn on finger in the max, then you can create a script or cgi to finger the max to display the users on.  Finger is just causing a character dump so it's a lot faster than snmp walking and it has little cpu hit.   If you don't want everybody in the world to be able to finger your maxen, you can look at creating a filter to block unwanted ips from being able to finger the max's ip.  The bad thing about using a filter is that its going to take a big hit on cpu.  To get around this, we wrote a little expect script to replace finger (called it finger2).  This script telnets to the max, logs in, goes into full access mode, drops to the term server prompt, does a #show users, then quits and closes the telnet session.  It was super simple to write (check into expect and the autoexpect tool) and it's a!
 lot faster than snmp walking, causes little cpu hit on the max, doesn't require filters to protect the finger port, and with a little more scripting the output looks just like the finger command.  We've used this as the base for several customer support cgi tools and for monitoring line usage for number of lines in use/ percent analog/ percent digital.  This can be done by wrapping the finger2 script and grepping out strings like "64K" and "56K" then counting them up and displaying the output so that mrtg can use it to graph our stats.  Mrtg is great for this stuff?..you can get it at 
http://ee-staff.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/mrtg.html
All these tools are free and work great for what we need?.no need for buying Navis.

Scott McDonald
Systems Engineer
MyLink, Inc.
Admin@MyLink.net



-----Original Message-----
From:	Dean.Finkeldei@chron.com [SMTP:Dean.Finkeldei@chron.com]
Sent:	Wednesday, August 25, 1999 9:46 AM
To:	ascend-users@bungi.com
Subject:	(ASCEND) Navis cost too much

I have 4 max 4000's and would like to get some of the features that navis
access provides. The problem is we are not going to spend $14,000 to do it. 
Here is my question.
What products are the rest of you using to "keep track"
I found the mib string to do a show users, and I am going to either write,
or have someone else write a script to show the info every 20 seconds for
use at our help desk. That is all they need to know.
Is anyone else doing this kind of stuff.

Any help in this non-critical issue will be greatly appreciated.

here is the mib string I am going to use.
snmpwalk -v1 "maxbox" .1.3.6.1.4.1.529.12.3.1	add a .4 and you get just
the users.

0101010001100001011010110110010100100000011010010111010000100000010001010100
0001010100110101100100100001
Dean Finkeldei
Systems Engineer
Houston Chronicle
voice 713.220.7697
fax 713.354.3180
mailto:sysjdf@chron.com
 

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