Media,82460,enEfforts are being pushed by the MUG-IT staff to improve monitoring capabilities for the essential services. This foremost includes our mail-system which is powered by Novell Groupwise 7.0.3HP3 (I know it's a big ugly blob but I have to deal with it). All agents are running on GNU/Linux thus the instructions here only apply to similar setups.

Groupwise documentation mentions that it is possible to integrate information from Groupwise agents into the net-snmp MIB tree. This is what I had to configure to get Groupwise OIDs running:

Put Groupwise MIBs into place as root:

wget -O - "http://storage.fladi.at/~FladischerMichael/GWMIB.tar.bz2" |\
tar xjC /usr/share/snmp/mibs/

Those MIBs are a bit outdated and I'd be glad if someone could point me towards a download containing newer ones.

Link the MIB directory to the place where Groupwise expects them:

ln -s /usr/share/snmp/mibs/ \
/opt/novell/groupwise/agents/mibs

Add this line to /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf to load the shared library from Groupwise into net-snmp:

dlmod Gwsnmp /opt/novell/groupwise/agents/lib/libgwsnmp.so

The libgwsnmp.so library has some dependencies on other libraries which reside in /opt/novell/groupwise/agents/lib so you need to extend the LD_LIBRARY_PATH when starting the net-snmp daemon. Add this line somewhere near the beginning of the file /etc/init.d/snmpd:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/opt/novell/groupwise/agents/lib

Now make sure that the agents to be monitored do not have a SNMP community string set, i.e. they have an empty value. This can be verified/modified through ConsoleOne.

There is still one caveat: Groupwise needs to be started after the net-snmp daemon (snmpd) has been started, otherwise no information will be available through SNMP for Groupwise. So one has to restart Groupwise after restarting snmpd (e.g. caused by logrotate).

This are the OIDs to available for each running agent:

  • GWMTA: 
    snmpwalk -v2c -c public localhost .1.3.6.1.4.1.23.2.37.1
  • GWIA: 
    snmpwalk -v2c -c public localhost .1.3.6.1.4.1.23.2.70.1
  • GWPOA: 
    snmpwalk -v2c -c public localhost .1.3.6.1.4.1.23.2.38.1
  • GWWEB: 
    snmpwalk -v2c -c public localhost .1.3.6.1.4.1.23.2.77.1

If you are not able to retrieve the Grouwpise OIDs, take a look at the net-snmp log file which can be found at /var/log/net-snmp.log and look for errors while starting the net-snmp daemon.

I'm also working on Cacti templates right now to use these OIDs for monitoring and graphing: http://subversion.fladi.at/scratchpad/FladischerMichael/trunk/GW%20for%20Cacti/