[mrtg] how to configure MRTG with a dynamic IP address

[Steve Shipway]

You need to allocate a static IP to your devices.  For my network at home, I used to do it by configuring the DHCP to bind a fixed IP to a particular MAC address, so I could be sure of always getting the same IP.  However, when I changed my router, I could no longer do this, so instead I disabled DHCP and assigned fixed IP addresses to the servers.  Eventually, I reenabled DHCP, but gave it a smaller address pool (2-99) and used the high numbers for fixed addresses on the hosts I wanted to monitor.

Something you might like to look into as well (if it is configurable) is to set the DHCP lease time to something like 24 hours or more, to ensure a machine continues to get the same IP address, if it is used daily.  I even set mine to 1 week at one point, without problem.

If you have a lot of coding skill, you could possibly write something that uses ARP to identify MAC addresses and logs counts against them but that would be lots of work.

Steve

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From: mrtg-bounces at lists.oetiker.ch [mailto:mrtg-bounces at lists.oetiker.ch] On Behalf Of Begum Bolu
Sent: Tuesday, 27 October 2009 1:38 a.m.
To: mrtg at lists.oetiker.ch
Subject: [mrtg] how to configure MRTG with a dynamic IP address

Hi,

I have a modem-router(Huawei E960) which sets up the IP addresses dynamically. A pc that boots up first gets 192.168.1.100 and second gets x.x.x.101 and so on. i only know how to setup monitoring network traffic by using the ip address of the pc at the time of the configuration. that works fine till the rest of the day but makes an issue after shut down and the bootup order of the Pcs is changed. Basically it doesnt graph any traffic after the ip address is changed.

i searched mrtg mail achieves a lot yesterday. only found 2 possible solutions but i am not sure neither of them. thats why i am asking for your help. one of the solutions was reseting the registry of 'ip address lease after shutdown'. my initial thought was assigning one ip address to a computer indefinitely might create some problems later on. i might be wrong. if this is a good solution, i would like to know the reasons. the second solution was a dhcp script for mrtg by Eric Garnel. i didnt quite understand how to modify the code and its pretty old message (way back in 2003).

I really would like to get this MRTG working. Any assist that will help me to achieve that would be appreciated.

Cheers
Becky
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