AIX Proxying

Abstract

At work we recently began a network changeover from Tru64 to AIX servers. The way the network is build our monitoring server is on a different subnet then our AIX hosts. There is only a few connections that are possible between networks to maximize the security. In this paper I will talk about what it took for us to get the new AIX servers to be monitored with Zenoss. This is some notes that I took in getting this process going in hopes the help others with the same issue.

Network Overview

Our AIX servers are on a different subnet then our monitoring server. This caused some issues that needed to be solved as we had to tweak the ACLs on the Cisco gear. In the event that the servers are all on the same network this will probably not be an issue. Once all the access lists are in order, you need to make sure that the SNMP packets are routing out the correct interface.

AIX SNMP Setup

The one thing that we needed to make sure of in the configuration was that the community names were the same. I am not sure if this is mandatory or not, just what worked best for us.

Configuration File Changes

The first change that we had to add on our hosts was to make sure you have the following in the inittab for how you call the net-snmp daemon.

-I -interfaces 

Below is what we added to the Net-SNMP configuration files to proxy the requests properly. No other changes were required for our build.

# Proxy IBM Agnt Requests for port number
proxy -v 1 -c public 127.0.0.1:161 1.3.6.1.4.1.2.2.1.1.0
proxy -v 1 -c public 127.0.0.1:161 1.3.6.1.4.1.2.2.1.1.1.0
# Proxy iftable(IF-MIB: Interface Names & Stats), iptable and ifalias
proxy -v 1 -c public 127.0.0.1:161 .1.3.6.1.2.1
proxy -v 1 -c public 127.0.0.1:161 .1.3.6.1.2.1.4.20.1
# Proxy RFC1213-MIB (Route Info)
proxy -v 1 -c public 127.0.0.1:161 .1.3.6.1.2.1.4.21.1
# Proxy SysUptime (netsnmp doesn't work)
proxy -v 1 -c public 127.0.0.1:161 1.3.6.1.2.1.25.1.1.0
# Proxy the SNMP Descr so OS shows up properly in zenoss parsing
proxy -v 1 -c public 127.0.0.1:161 .1.3.6.1.2.1.1.1.0