snmp over internet "best practice"

[Russell Adams]

On Sat, Aug 25, 2007 at 10:17:43AM +0200, Tobias Klausmann wrote:
> Hi! 
> 
> On Fri, 24 Aug 2007, Russell Adams wrote:
> > The argument was always SNMP (inferring v1), versus NRPE. I've been an
> > advocate of using SNMP because there was little client software to
> > maintain.
>
> That said, the only disadvantage of NRPE (security-wise) I can
> see is that probably more people look at and dissect snmp daemons
> than NRPE. But NRPE is smaller, so that may compensate.

I find NRPE to have scaling issues. 

Most OS's have an snmpd either installed by default or readily
available in the package manager (including Windows!). The majority of
embedded devices have one too, whether you configure it or not. This
equates to little to no client software or configuration. Ever.

Now take NRPE. I have to distribute plugins and the agent, then keep
the NRPE configuration and plugins on every system in sync with what I'm
monitoring in Nagios.

That's not a problem for a few servers, but try maintaining it in a
large mixed environment.

I frequently work in environments which are not always hospitable to
OSS, and the idea of distributing an OSS agent to every system is not
an option. I can ask that the native SNMPD be turned on with a
specific configuration, because it is supplied with the OS and
supported by the vendor.

Now, SNMPD can't monitor everything that NRPE can. There's no
cure-all, but for 90% of my monitoring needs SNMPD can do it out of
the box as long as the Host Resources MIB is supported.

Thanks!





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Russell Adams                            RLAdams at AdamsInfoServ.com

PGP Key ID:     0x1160DCB3           http://www.adamsinfoserv.com/

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