Enabling SNMP for GroupWise 8 on Linux

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First of all, this is my first document for Cool Solutions, so please boys and girls, be gentle



That being said, lets get some SNMP support on our beloved GroupWise system on our beloved operating system:




  1. GroupWise's SNMP relies on net-snmp, which should be installed by default. If not, install it with YaST.







  • Extract the files downloaded in step 2

  • Create the following directory on your GroupWise server: /opt/novell/groupwise/agents/mibs/

  • Copy the extracted files from step 3 to the directory "/opt/novell/groupwise/agents/mibs"

  • Add the following line in /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf:
    "dlmod Gwsnmp /opt/novell/groupwise/agents/lib/libgwsnmp.so"

  • Restart the snmpd service with "/etc/init.d/snmpd restart"

  • Also make sure that "snmpd" starts at boot time with the command "chkconfig snmpd on"

  • Now this is a part which is not so very nice. The libgwsnmp.so has a bug in it which demands that groupwise is running on all ip addresses. In other words, make sure that "bind specifically to this IP-address" in ConsoleOne is de-selected for all GroupWise objects. Make sure that you read the section "libgwsnmp" on the bottom of this page for impact riscs.

  • SNMP should be by default enabled for every GroupWise object. If you have disabled it, make sure to re-enable it. (By the way, for some reason will log files always say that SNMP is disabled. Nevermind what the logfiles say about SNMP)

  • Restart GroupWise "/etc/init.d/grpwise restart"

  • You should now be able to retrieve snmp information from GroupWise with your favorite snmpbrowser (I use the mibbrowser from iReasoning on Linux, you can load the mib-files which you have extracted in step 3 into this program easily)



Libgwsnmp:


Libgwsnmp makes use of the http interfaces on the groupwise objects to retrieve information which is then again presented to snmp clients. Now the problem is that libgwsnmp only looks at the 127.0.0.1 address, so if you bind a groupwise object to a specific IP-address, then the libgwsnmp module is unable to retrieve any information and thus is snmpd not able to present this information to the snmp client. This behaviour creates 2 problems.



Problem 1:


If you have configured for example multiple Post Offices on one single server and all on a different IP address, then you MUST reconfigure all the ports so that they don't interfere with each other when you de-select "bind elusively to this IP-address".



Problem 2:


If you run a gwia on this server, you must reconfigure postfix to use another port than 25, because else the gwia won't start up properly. (The gwia does not give an error message when it can not bind to 0.0.0.0:25 (!!!))



Hope this works for you.



Regards,



Justin Zandbergen

NetCB Solutions



Labels:

How To-Best Practice
Comment List
  • Justin,

    Nice article, but to me it seems the mibs are not really updated as GW has updated ans has become a cluster aware app. Selecting "bind to this ip exclusively" is a requirement as far as i know, when gw reources are running as clustered resources in, lets say, a NCS OES2 Linux environment. When your resource failes over and in that occasion, your gw volumes and poa/mta move to another server, the original ipadress has to come along too. How is it possible to monitor this thru SNMP browser when youre not able to bind the specific resource to the corresponding ipaddress ?
    Is GW Monitor not a better tool for monitoring this ?
  • Hi Justin,

    Great article. The mib files are not in the linux downloads. To get the mib files download the nlmwin file.
    Then you can find them in the agents - snmp directory.
    The files are:

    gwada.mib
    gwapi.mib
    gwia.mib
    gwmon.mib
    gwmta.mib
    gwovvm.mib
    gwpoa.mib
    gwsmtp.mib
    gwsnads.mib
    gwweb.mib
    ngwasync.mib
    ngwx400.mib

    Rename them to lowercase though.....
    It looks like they're using the same mib files for quite some time now, but i'm not sure of the gwapi.mib. This means that u can also use the mibs out of the older groupwise versions. They should still work :D:D



  • @wnsks:
    the libgwsnmp.so module is compiled for 32bit only. So it is sadly enough not possible to run this module on x86_64.

    There is a small "maybe" (read "I don't have a clue" ;-) ) that if you recompile net-snmp as 32 bit that you could be able to load the 32 bit libgwsnmp.so module in there. But.... i doubt it :P
    some info: www.cyberciti.biz/.../compile-32bit-application-using-gcc-64-bit-linux.html

    My advice, GroupWise is not 64 bit either, so if you do not run any other (64 bit) services on that server, go for the 32 bit SLES10sp2 installation.

    Regards,

    justin
  • in reply to MigrationDeletedUser
    Oh Yes,

    I am very sorry, the libgwsnmp.so module is compiled ONLY for 32 bit, so that is not going to work on x86_64. But then again, GroupWise is also developed in 32 bit so do you really need a 64bit OS? (maybe other services?)

    I would recommend:
    1) sles10sp2 x86 and then use the PAE kernel (check with "uname -r" in the shell).
    2) filesystem ext3 and then mounted with the "noatime" option.
    3) increase the "maximum number of open filehandles to 32768
    "add the following lines in /etc/security/limits.conf"
    root soft nofile 32768
    root hard nofile 32768
    - logout and login again, check with the command "ulimit -n" if the nofile settings worked.

    Regards,

    Justin
  • dlopen failed: /opt/novell/groupwise/agents/lib/libgwsnmp.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32
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