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SNMP Polling Behavior

To: nv-l@lists.tivoli.com
Subject: SNMP Polling Behavior
From: Kent_Allison@advantra.com.au
Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2001 09:09:49 +1100
Hi Everyone,

We've recently had an occurrence of a NetView 6.0.1 (on Solaris 2.7)
causing a Cisco 4700 router running IOS 11.0 with DLSW circuits to lock up
with CPUHOG values around 4500 (they're due to be decommissioned hence the
IOS hasn't been upgraded).  The router support people did a trace and found
the following sequence:

1. Ping

2. Walking the SNMP tree for all .1.3.6.1.2.1.4.22.1.3.7, which is
ipNetToMediaNetAddress; it maps things like
.1.3.6.1.2.1.4.22.1.3.7.10.1.2.3  => 10.1.2.3.  This appeared unlimited and
retrieved about 720 entries.

3. Two well-behaved GETs - ifNumber, sysName

4. Walking the SNMP tree for all .1.3.6.1.4.1.9.9.23.1.2.1.1.6, which is
the CDP discovery table. It retrieved 9 entries. This seems limited, since
there are 25 entries in this table on this router.

5. Two more pings.

To make matters worse this was occurring every 40 minutes.  The only thing
which appears excessive is the walk of all the ipNetToMediaNetAddress
branch.

The other relevant factors are the routers in question were not being SNMP
status polled and that the SNMP configuration applying to them was the
"global default" of:

# Timeout 4 secs
# Retries 2
# Fixed Poll Interval 2 hours
# Discovery Interval 1 week
# Config check interval  1 day
# Route entries to retrieve 10
*.*.*.*:public:*:40:2:7200:::604800:604800:86400:10:1:0:1

Also, I had been swopping the SNMP configuration from a "drp" configuration
(above) to "production" configuration as part of troubleshooting another
issue.  I wont post the script used to do this here but suffice it to say
that xnmsnmpconf was used with the clearcache and import parameters.

Now to the questions (sorry for the long append).

Does anyone have any ideas why NetView ended up "ignoring" it's polling
settings and "hit" the routers every 40 minutes?

Can anyone confirm that the get of the ipNetToMediaNetAddress branch is
part of a config check, or is it something else?  Indeed, does anyone know
what exactly SNMP information is retrieved during config checking and
discovery polling?

Does the SNMP configuration option to number of route entries retrieved
also limit the  number of entries retrieved from the CDP table?

Finally, given that the routers aren't about to be upgraded, does anyone
have any recommendations on how to limit SNMP to these boxes (without
unmanaging them (and without disabling SNMP on the routers themselves)?

Thank you for your time.

Cheers,
               Kent


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