[mrtg] Re: Firewall monitoring

[Graeme Fowler]

On 20-Aug-99 Martin Ansdell-Smith wrote:
> On Thu, 19 Aug 1999, Kyle Maxwell wrote:
> 
>> I'm trying to monitor loads on firewalls.
<snip>
>
> An alternative might be that the information could be in the firewall
> logs and you might be able to get it from that (although it may not
> be available as frequently as every 5 minutes by default).

I was going to suggest that leaving an snmp agent running on a firewall
is pretty insecure in itself, unless you have *absolute* trust in the
firewall's internal protection. It would probably be better (if it can
be done) to have the firewall log via syslogd to a remote machine, then
park a script on the tail of the log to output a file to MRTG for
graphing.

If the firewall is some kind of Unix box this would be pretty easy, but
if it's a 'solid-state' one (like the Lucent Managed Firewall which
we're testing right now) then it'll be nigh-on impossible...

My £0.02

Graeme
-- 
Graeme Fowler
Network Officer, Infrastructure & Networks Group
Loughborough University Computing Services
+44 1509 228426

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