After the decommission of  our IBM X345 and IBM X346 servers, I started looking at how to make use of them.

Reasons being that they are 32bit servers with heaps of space but the constraints of 3 GB RAM.

After reading the bible on getting ESXi and Openfiler talking, decided to turn those babies into Openfiler NAS devices. Follow the bible and your sweet.

Now thats all good but I need to monitor everything and anything that runs in my environment and one of my favourite would be the poor mans monitoring system Cacti. I use other monitoring systems as well but love Cacti for the visual and graphical approach to monitoring. But thats for another post.

So to Config SNMP on Openfiler do the following:-

1. Get WinSCP. Awesome tool to transfer files between your Windows Box and Linux boxes. Basically you would need SSH enabled on the linux Box

2. Use WinSCP to connect to your Openfiler Box

3. On the Openfiler Side of WinSCP browse to the folder /etc/snmp and right click and press copy on the snmp.conf file.

4. Open your My Documents or the location that you copied the snmp.conf file to.

5. Use your favorite notepad editor, for me notepad++ does the job , to open the file and create a COPY FIRST so that if we do muck up we always have the original.

6. Type the following into the file at the very end

rocommunity public
com2sec local localhost {IP address of the monitoring server}
com2sec network_l {Network address allowed to access the server}/24
group MyROGroup_1 v2c local
group MyROGroup_1 v2c network_1
view all-mibs included .1 80
access MyROGroup_1 .. v1 noauth exact all-mibs none none
access MyROGroup_2 .. v2c noauth exact all-mibs none none

7. Either use putty or WinSCP to restart the SNMP service on OpenFiler by running the following command:

service snmpd restart

8. Go back to your monitoring software and start monitoring your Openfiler Appliance.

Some of the graphs that I have just started generating