Chapter 12. Adapting SNMP to Fit Your Environment

12.1. General Trap-Generation Program

Chapter 10, "Traps" contained some scripts for collecting SNMP information using Perl, OpenView's snmptrap program, and some other tools. Here's how we used snmptrap to generate a trap giving us information about some problems with the database:

$ /opt/OV/bin/snmptrap -c public nms .1.3.6.1.4.1.2789.2500 "" 6 3003 "" \
.1.3.6.1.4.1.2500.3003.1 octetstringascii "Oracle" \
.1.3.6.1.4.1.2500.3003.2 octetstringascii "Backup Not Running" \
.1.3.6.1.4.1.2500.3003.3 octetstringascii "Call the DBA Now for Help"

The way you send a trap in Perl is a little more involved, but it's still easy to use:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
# Filename: /opt/local/perl_scripts/snmptrap.pl 

use SNMP_util "0.54";  # This will load the BER and SNMP_Session

snmptrap("public\@nms:162", ".1.3.6.1.4.1.2789", "sunserver1", 
          6, 1247, ".1.3.6.1.4.1.2789.1247.1", "int", "2448816");

In this chapter, we won't look so much at how to write commands like these, but at how to use them in clever ways. We might want to include commands like these in startup scripts, or invoke them via hooks into other programs. We'll start by writing some code that records successful logins.