Exim4 "n00b" Guides

Exim4 is a very powerful MTA(the default for Debian Etch). Getting started with it is a bit daunting, and I found the official website too chock full of info to be useful for a newbie.

These two sites help quite a bit:

http://www.techcuriosity.com/resources/exim/exim.php

http://bradthemad.org/tech/notes/exim_cheatsheet.php

Exim Cheatsheet

This page has a good single-page command line admin reference for the popular exim MTA(the default MTA for Debian Etch).

I found it very useful.

http://bradthemad.org/tech/notes/exim_cheatsheet.php

Good article

Good blog post about part of one of Obama's recent speeches that talked about GTA4.

http://stupidgamer.com/2008/05/01/barack-obama-on-gta-iv/

SNMP Traps now working

Well, continueing from the past two postings, I have figured out what the problem was with the sending of SNMP traps. Apparently trap2sink sends a SNMPv2 trap, while trapsink sends a SNMPv1 trap.

trapsink works, trap2sink does not work.

I do not know why, but I have tested this. With trapsink configured alerts are received in IT Assistant, with trap2sink configured, no alerts are seen in the alert log.

That solves that! I think I finally have a fully managed 64-bit Debian Server....whats next?

Further down the rabbit hole...

So I got the OMSA service working on my 64-bit Debian server. THATS all fine and dandy.

Yesterday, I spent hours getting the nuances setup correctly to just get this thing to be "managed" by the central Dell OpenManage server, hopefully my hard work will help someone out there.

First, in terms of server monitoring, Dell has their "client" OpenManage Server Administrator(OMSA), and their "server" IT Assistant.

My IT Assistant is installed on windows and is pretty self-explanatory to get that part done, and I already explained how to install OMSA.

Now, in order for IT Assistant to manage an OMSA client, it must have SNMP read-only access to it, and in Linux, this is done through snmpd via SMUX and in Debian, SMUX is disabled by default(but isn't immediately obvious).

First of all, you need to enable SNMP read-only access to your server.

Then, you need to add a smux configuration for the dell OID. Add this to your recently-made snmpd.conf

# Allow Systems Management Data Engine SNMP to connect to snmpd using SMUX
smuxpeer .1.3.6.1.4.1.674.10892.1

As I said, by default Debian has SMUX turned off. You need to re-enable it by deleting the -I -smux in the startup options line in the /etc/default/snmpd file.

Now make sure you restart your snmpd service

/etc/init.d/snmpd restart

Your Debian SNMP configuration is complete. You can check the status of the dell data engine by:

/opt/dell/srvadmin/dataeng/bin/dataeng status

Now add a 'range' in IT Assistant with the IP of your server and community string you setup for your server. Then run a discovery job and it should appear in your devices list. The icon next to the device signifies if there are any current alerts applicable to this server.

Congratulations, you can now "manage" your server.

My current problem is that it appears that I cannot have IT Assistant generate alerts for my server since it can only do so if it receives a trap from the server. I find this pretty silly, it should support alerting me based on its polling, not just by waiting for an alert.

I defined a trapsink in my snmpd.conf, and the hardware log shows the event(me pulling out a hard drive), but no trap is received by the IT Assistant. My syslog shows the following:

May  1 14:05:41 inp2552zeus snmpd[5992]: Got trap from peer on fd 14
May  1 14:05:42 inp2552zeus snmpd[5992]: Got trap from peer on fd 14
May  1 14:05:43 inp2552zeus snmpd[5992]: Got trap from peer on fd 14
May  1 14:05:44 inp2552zeus snmpd[5992]: Got trap from peer on fd 14
May  1 14:05:45 inp2552zeus snmpd[5992]: Got trap from peer on fd 14

Anyone have any idea what the issue could be?