Karl Katzke

Ok, so you’ve got this [ hot new APC unit, new RAID array, network switch, router ]. The vendor, in their infinite wisdom, supplied a driver disk. But the device got a web management interface, so you just monitor things through there and watch for any problems to pop up. That MIB file can be used to get the names for the SNMP array address of different values. Here’s how.

First, copy your .mib file into the /usr/share/snmp/mibs/ directory (or your linux distro equivalent). Then use snmpwalk in the following format:

snmpwalk [address] -c [community string] -v 1 -m [mib name] [object to scan]

The mib name is usually one of the first lines of the MIB; for the ACNC JetStor devices at work, it’s “ARECA-SNMP-MIB” and found on the first line, right before “DEFINITIONS ::= BEGIN”.

If you’re on Windows, you have a choice of several freeware applications that will happily take your MIB file and scan a device for you.

After you’ve got the path to the value you want to monitor, you can set up plugins in Nagios and other programs to monitor those addresses.