NetHorus Blog

Thanks to the lovely people at Atlassian, I’m now using Jira to track bugs, features and improvements in NetHorus.  So far, it’s working well and I’ve fixed several low-level issues over the past week – the most important is that the application will now start up, and not crash hideously, when no configuration file is present.

I’ve been beavering away.  I’m much happier with the state of the codebase now – it’s a lot more robust now I’ve implemented SNMP proxy checks.

So, what’s happening?

• I’ve put RMON support on hold for a little bit, as I need to rewrite SNMP support.  I have a number of ways in I might want to retrieve data – an OID and instance, and a whole table are easy.  The hard part is retrieving just one row from a table, or just a few columns from the whole table.
• A really useful feature I’ve yet to code is relating IP addresses, MAC address and hostnames.  Several things need to come together for this, notably VLAN awareness.  I may start by importing the IEEE’s OUI database.
• SNMP traps and informs will be handled by a separate daemon.  Informs are an important addition, as they’re ‘guaranteed’ to be delivered to an NMS.

I’m off on holiday later this week, with some long train journeys and several hours a day free – expect more code!