[smokeping-users] Re: Problem with IOSPing

[Michael Markstaller]

Hi,

getting back to this I want to collect some opinions and maybe some experiences.
I went through Cisco-Ping-MIB and found it quite useless because the lack of support to specify the source IP/If.
Cisco-RTTMON-Mib (called SAA/RTR on routers' side) is complete and would be a great deal as Smokeping probe but quite complex to handle. But the abailities would be great as it would provide any current IOS-router as remote probe for many protocols (ICMP,UDP,TCP,HTTP,DNS etc.)
I know about and use Cisco's IPM (which actually uses this MIB) but I don't like IPM that much...

I already read through Cisco-RTTMON-MIB and creating Smokeping-probes, so I'm finally planning to actually write (and share afterwards) a smokeping-probe for RTTMON-Mib but with my limited perl know-how and resources any help/hint would be appreciated. What I need to achive for my monitoring is:
- Probe latency and probably some other things with RTTMON-Mib from several (50) Routers, so I need speed and effeciency from the start. There're especially IPSec-SA's to be monitored so this could be several pings from each devices)
- Monitor the RTR probes on the routers from Nagios later, as Smokeping is very fine for latency-reporting but not for monitoring (scheduled downtimes, host-dependencies etc.).

I'm asking myself a few question now:
- Anybody else interested in uisng RTR on cisco-boxes as probes
- is there an easier way (besides IPM) ?
- should the RTR be created once running forever on the router and then only polled from Smokeping (and recreated if not existant)
	- this is the intentional "how-to-use-RTR" Cisco had
	- would make monitoring possible with something other (my Nagios)
	- would make coding the probe harder 
	- results in orphaned probes and resulting traffic if removed from smokeping until next reload (I'm still thinking about that, maybe I can flag each RTR-probe on the Cisco's with a flag uniquely identifying "my" smokeping instance and kill all orphaned probes)
	- It can run always, so i.e. for 20 pings with steps 300 I could do a ping every 15 seconds which would make stats-distribution more real (campared with running the 20 pings within 2 seconds while probing.
- the other way would be to create a RTR-probe each run and kill it after reading the results
	- I already see myself seeking a mem-leak with cisco-TAC ;)

Another problem I see, again my perl know-how is "limited". Smokeping expects (pings)-values from each probe which is a global parameter. now I want to keep making 20 pings but the RTTMON-probe will intentionally only return 3 values (min/avg/max); 
what is the best way to intergrate the probe into smokeping with having 20 pings configured returning only 3 values ? making 20 out of 3 values (a perl sniplet will make me more than happy ;) or is there a smoother way to do ?

Anybody having experiences with using Cisco-RTTMON-MIB to probe things ? Any sample would speed up things much for me..

Michael

-----Original Message-----
From: MarsWei at ncic.com.tw [mailto:MarsWei at ncic.com.tw]
Sent: Monday, April 28, 2003 2:53 AM
To: Michael Markstaller; smokeping-users at list.ee.ethz.ch
Subject: RE: [smokeping-users] Re: Problem with IOSPing


Dear Michael,

    Thanks a lot. In fact, I have already done so and it works fine since that. Also, thanks Tobi's directions.

Best Regards,
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mars Chih-hua Wei
Engineer/Network Application Planning Group/Network Group
New Century InfoComm Tech Co., Ltd.

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Markstaller [mailto:mm at elabnet.de]
Sent: Saturday, April 26, 2003 11:53 PM
To: smokeping-users at list.ee.ethz.ch
Subject: [smokeping-users] Re: Problem with IOSPing


> Dear Tobi,
>    I wonder if it is possible to add a variable for source IP for the advanced Ping in IOSPing. If it's possible, what could I do? Thanks a lot.
I've just patched the IOSPing.pm to be able to specify the source-interface (you cannot specify the IP in the IOS ping command, at least not the rsh way).
Maybe this helps, the changed IOSPing.pm is attached. You just have to insert "iossrcif" i.e.:
--- cut ---
++++ PROBE_CONF
ioshost = router
iosuser = smoke
iossrcif = FastEthernet0/0
--- cut ---

May be the author (Paul J Murphy <paul at murph.org>) wants to integrate this into the IOSPing-probe sometime as I think it's quite vital to specify the source.. 
BTW, I'm (still) thinking of the best solution creating an SAA/RTR probe using SNMP which would be more convinient to use without creating the "rsh" security-hole.. Also there's a Cisco ping-mib which would also be smoother. But besides the "rsh-issue" I really like the idea of IOSPringProbe..

regards

Michael

-- Attached file removed by Ecartis and put at URL below --
-- Type: application/octet-stream
-- Desc: IOSPing.pm
-- Size: 6k (6434 bytes)
-- URL : http://www.ee.ethz.ch/~slist/p/02-IOSPing.pm


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