Article

(View Disclaimer)

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.
2. I couldn't find the required "mib" files as was stated in the documentation, so if you happen to have the same problem, you can download them from the following links
   
   • gwpoa-mib: http://www.oidview.com/mibs/23/GWPOA-MIB.html
   • gwmta-mib: http://www.oidview.com/mibs/23/GWMTA-MIB.html
   • gwiamib: http://www.oidview.com/mibs/23/GWIAMIB.html
   • gwweb-mib: http://www.oidview.com/mibs/23/GWWEB-MIB.html
3. Extract the files downloaded in step 2
4. Create the following directory on your GroupWise server: /opt/novell/groupwise/agents/mibs/
5. Copy the extracted files from step 3 to the directory "/opt/novell/groupwise/agents/mibs"
6. Add the following line in /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf:
   "dlmod Gwsnmp /opt/novell/groupwise/agents/lib/libgwsnmp.so"
7. Restart the snmpd service with "/etc/init.d/snmpd restart"
8. Also make sure that "snmpd" starts at boot time with the command "chkconfig snmpd on"
9. 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.
10. 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)
11. Restart GroupWise "/etc/init.d/grpwise restart"
12. 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

Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.