[nv-l] NetView User Group Announcements

["Barr, Scott" <Scott_Barr@csgsystems.com>]

Greetings, the Tivoli Global NetView Users group has some announcements to make.

 

1. First, we are preparing for our second Technical Exchange. The first one as you know was held in January and we had originally intended to do another at the end of March but due to some delays we are probably going to host the second technical exchange the first or second week in April. The topic will be Netmon with regard to discovery and location.conf. There will be an IBM represntative presenting the information. The exact date and the speaker are not yet confirmed, I just wanted to let everyone know that it was coming soon. Start preparing any questions you might have now, and I will forward them to the speaker prior to the event.

 

2. In conjunction with that technical exchange, the Netview Users group is preparing to release a new Utility (coded and donated by a "Friend Of NetView"). What this utility does is take your existing map, after you have customized it to your liking, and create a location.conf file from the actual map. Basically, it allows the visual design of location.conf instead of the trial and error process most of us have used. This code will be released as-is (non supported by IBM) and will be available soon on the NetView Web Site that Jane & Company have created.

 

3. The NetView Users Group collaborative web-site is operational. It is currently open by invitation only until all of the work is complete. If you are interested in logging on to it, contact Jane Curry for permission.

 

4. I am preparing to release to the User Group Community, a package of scripts, traps and automation designed to manage events from Cisco VPN concentrators and also to produce some statisical reports. Our environment makes use of several concentrators at remote locations and we needed a way to know if they were down. It's not as easy as it sounds, trust me. I am looking for volunteers to review the materials for accuracy as well as folks literate in rulesets and PERL to help with optimization of the code and bullet-proofing. Here is a list of the features incorporated into this package:

 

 

VPN Monitor Features

 

Identifies when any VPN user logs on and logs off.

Stores this in a log called /var/log/vpn_listener.log

 

Counts up how many times a user has connected.

How many times the user has logged on since the daemon has restarted

How many times the user has logged on since the last time the stats were requested

 

Dumps the stats to a file called /var/log/vpn_stats.log (sample output below) Report shows all users sorted in order.

 

Identifies if the user who logged on is a critical VPN connection.

Holds event notification for 5 minutes in case it comes right back up

If not, issues pages to oncall personnel

 

Has a real time monitor interface if you want to watch the activitiy (via tailing logs) 

 

Can count up bytes received and transmitted for regular VPN users but not concentrators

 

Thanks for listening/reading. If you want to join the Netview Users Group go here:

 

http://www.tivoli-ug.org/groups.php?groupid=151