G'day fellow Sun managers,
I asked about SNMP traffic on the E10k the other day, and have
received some very helpful answers.
As I was reading the replies this morning, I was rather annoyed at
myself for not explaining the situation further (ie, I knew that the
Control Boards talked via JTAG to the SSPs, and I had done the ES-400
course (but the Control Board to SSP comms stuff was glossed over quite
quickly)) as well as mentioning what I knew about the situation.
I had been wondering whether the control boards spoke SNMP over JTAG
to the SSPs, and whether or not the domains themselves spoke to the
SSPs via SNMP over the public network. However, I looks like I was
wrong, and I'm happy to have been corrected.
Many thanks to Richard Elling, Peter L. Wargo, Marc Newman, Rui
Bastos, Stuart Green, Oscar Goosens, Daniel Polombo, and
'plb@concentric.net' for their replies.
Richard's reply cleared things up the best, so I have quoted it first.
Where possible, I have removed quotations of my original question to
save space.
Steve
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Richard's reply:
No. The control board communicates to the SSP with its own protocol, the
control board management protocol (CBMP). The cbs (control board server)
on the SSP talks CBMP to the cbe (control board executive) on the control
board. Other agents such as netcon, fad, and edd talk to the cbs via RPC.
edd is the master event detection daemon on the SSP. edd is responsible
for generating info for the snmpd proxy agent on the SSP. You will also
find a SNMP Trap Sink (straps) which talks to snmpd and netcon server.
You could save quite a bit of time if you would take the SunEducation
ES-400 course which discusses the SSP software environment.
-- richard
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Peter's reply:
I'm under the impression that it all goes over the JTAG on the private net
- I don't think the E10K and the SSP's commnuicate in any other way.
Be very careful mucking around with any of the SSP<->control board
connections.
We found out (by someone else's bad luck, not ours) that interruption and
reconnection of the private net *while the SSP is up* will cause problems.
First, shut down the ssp before making/breaking conenctions. THe reson I
mention this is that the E10K *will* halt if the connection get tromped
while
the SSP is up.
-Pete
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Marc's reply:
Remember, the traffic between the SSP and the control boards is on a private
lan, on the hubs provided by Sun.
Marc
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Rui's reply:
Hi,
I have a E10000 and I've played a bit with SNMP. First you can get the
E10000 mib from the SSP (find / -name \*mib -print) and load it under a SNMP
Manager. I believe the way the SSP gets the data from the E10K is through
the control boards in a proprietary way.
There are communities on the SSP machine that let you get the same data
hostview gets from the E10K. I don't recall where they are defined but I've
seen them.
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Stuart's reply:
Hello
In the short
CBE detects problem -> control board sends alert to SBS on SSP ->
which delivers it to the snmp agent from which EDD picks up the trap
and acts upon it.
Is this the stuff you are after? I can fax you the details if you want.
-stuart
PS I look after the e10 down the road for telstra at clayton.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Oscar's reply:
Hello Stephen,
I'd like to give just a quick response to your post for now, because I have
little time at present.
I know a bit about the E10000, I set one up and manage it for 1.5 years now.
>We assume that the domains talk to the SSP via SNMP over the public
>network, to keep things like 'hostview' up to date. But what sort of SNMP
>communication (if any) goes on between the Control Boards and the SSP?
I don't think your assumption is correct.
All of the SSP applications,including hostview, talk to the E10000 through
the controlboard, most use a protocol called JTAG (low-level IEEE standard,
originally used for testing VSLI electronics). It is the same (slow!)
protocol that is used by netcon to connect to a domain that has no TCP/IP
stack available.
For monitoring on an SNMP basis, perhaps you should have a look at Symon.
It is freely downloadable from Sun as long you use one client per server.
I've got to go, if this was any help but you want more info contact me
at goos@xs4all.nl
Oscar Goosens
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Daniel's reply:
Network supervision tools can communicate with most elements
of your network (including, of course, hosts) via SNMP by
sending SNMP requests to these various elements. I don't think
your server could spontaneously send SNMP messages to the
control boards, it has to get a query first.
> The documentation isn't exactly clear about this, saying that the 'edd'
> daemon keeps track of various things within the E10k.
Haven't checked that, but I figure the daemon locally keeps
track of the system's status, and sends replies to SNMP queries
it might get.
> Please note that at this stage we haven't had a chance to sit down with
> 'tcpdump' or similar to watch the packets go past. However, I think that
> we'll be doing this very shortly.
I'd suggest using 'snoop' instead (/usr/sbin/snoop), its output
is much easier to read.
Hope this helps,
Daniel
----------------------------------------------------------------------
'plb@concentric.net's reply:
Stephen,
The control boards on the E10k don't use snmp as the native protocol
to talk to the control board. They use an ethernet-level protocol called
JTAG. I don't know enough about it to explain it yet, but I'll be in
E10k class all next week. If you'd like, you can contact me in two
weeks and I'll fill you in.
-PLB
+------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Stephen Oxley, Shared Systems, Tel: +61-3-990-55738 |
| Computer Centre, Monash University, Fax: +61-3-990-54746 |
| Clayton, Victoria, ICBM: S37 54' 38.8" E145 07' 47.1" +200m |
| Australia, 3168. E-Mail: Stephen.Oxley@its.monash.edu.au |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------+
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