[nv-l] unexpected but interesting ipmap and location.conf behavior

[Leslie Clark <lclark@us.ibm.com>]

This is an observation, not a criticism, that might be of interest to users of location.conf. I know that the header for location.conf says that gateways, if not specifically placed elsewhere, will be placed at the most logical level relative to their subnets. That is, if you assign all of their subnets to a location, the router automatically goes there. If some subnets are down a level, the router goes at the higher level. If they are split among multiple locations at the same level, the router goes between those locations, etc. Well, it appears to me that this behavior is completely independant of the location.conf. I make it a practice to remove the location.conf from effect (replace it with the default one) and close/open the map so I can do any cleanup or revision needed. What I am seeing is that newly-discovered routers, gateways, and servers that look like routers are being placed according to the same rules even without the location!
 .conf file. Pretty neat, unless you are sitting there waiting for things to show up in the New Object Holding Area. 

Where this caused me some trouble: I have a lot of non-snmp, multi-addressed servers that I'm forcing together by putting common names in the /etc/hosts file. This promotes them to 'routers'. I don't want to see them at the IP-Internet level of the map, so I cut and paste them into a bucket to be hidden. The behind-the-scenes location.conf behavior is putting them back in the submap it wants them in, giving me illegal copies. The solution was to specify them in the location.conf, forcing them to be in the HIDE bucket rather than allowing them to be placed according to the default algorithm.

Cordially,

Leslie A. Clark
IBM Global Services - Systems Mgmt & Networking
Detroit