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Re: SNMP Scanning method

by AcidHawk (Vicar)
on Apr 02, 2003 at 10:08 UTC ( [id://247457]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to SNMP Scanning method

I haven't worked with nearly as many servers as you are talking about with perl and snmp, although I have queried 100-120 servers over the WAN.

In my experience due to the fact that udp is not guaranteed delivery, querying SNMP over the WAN is NOT advisable. Often these packets get dropped for packets with higher priority (particularly on a WAN link that is heavily burdened.)

What I had to do was create staging servers, if you will, that do the snmp queries over the lan and store the responses into a repository of some sort. I use XML. I then use a TCP connection over the WAN links to ship the XML data to my central server, where I process the results from teh snmp queries.

---- ---- ---- | |___W_A_N___| |__S_N_M_P___| | | | T C P | | U D P | | ---- ---- ---- Central Staging Queried Server Server Server

Obviously the Staging Server can just be a Win32 Service or daemon of some type running on an existing piece of hardware.

HTH.

-----
Of all the things I've lost in my life, its my mind I miss the most.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Re: SNMP Scanning method
by meetraz (Hermit) on Apr 02, 2003 at 18:00 UTC
    Yeah, I've thought about this.. but we have servers spread over 26 states. Even if we were to have a "staging server" in every state, we'd still be doing SNMP queries over the WAN in each state. Thanks for the suggestion though.

      Have you considered an agent manager type technology.

      This may not be feesible as you are talking about 5000+ servers, but what if you did the SNMP queries with a lightweight agent that you deploy to each server, save the responses in a local repository(eg XML file) and then sent those details via TCP to a Central Server. This would take a while to implement and the admin for doing this is high(although a lot could be scripted), but doing it this way can also cut down the traffic you need to send.(I.e. You only have to send CHANGES to the previous XML data not the entire set of data again.)

      Just a thought. I have done this on a much smaller scale than 5000 servers though.

      -----
      Of all the things I've lost in my life, its my mind I miss the most.
        Yes, actually this is in the works. We're still in the planning stages, and corporate bureaucracy means it could be another year before it could even be fully deployed. For now, using SNMP seems like our best option.

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