Hardware monitoring on IEA system

[steven_geerts]

Hello,

We have recently acquired a few Ironport Encryption Appliances (IEA's). We are a little disappointed in the overall appliance management of these systems.

Ironport (Cisco nowadays) has spend an enormous effort in getting the C, S and most likely also the S series as closed as possible. personally I like this fact since it makes it totally clear that no Unix sys-admin should try to install "corporate-standard" system management agents (like Tivoli agents, backup agents etc).

The IEA apeared to be a loosly hardened CentOs-5 box with the encryption software installed on top of it.
The problem of this is that we did not find any decent way to monitor the systems hardware status. We have been able to create an additional system user that we use to give our Nagios monitoring system access to the most critical application statuses (is PG-SQL running, is the Post-X process running, is the system listening on TCP25, are there no queued items etc).

Besides the RAID status we have not been able to monitor any of the hardware sensors.

I know the used Dell hardware is supported by IPMI but that tool is not installed (and we do not want to install any additional packages).

Anyone any ideas?

Thanks, Steven

[Andreas Mueller]

Hello Steven,

I have checked internally for some similar questions, and so far the status is that an SNMP demon is already running on the IEAs, yet we do not have any MIB designed for these models, and SNMP monituring is not yet supported, although we have feature requests for that to get it implemented in future versions. Sorry for not being much of a help here, but just thought I'd let you know.

Regards,

Andreas

[steven_geerts]

Hello Andreas,

Thanks for diving into this. We will try to get the stuff going with SNMP.