- What is NOCOL ?
-
nocol (Network Operation Center On-Line)
is a collection of system and
network monitoring agents which have a common viewing interface and
logging mechanism. It can be used to monitor your LAN or WAN network
devices as well as your Unix systems and services.
- How does NOCOL differ from MRTG ?
- MRTG is primarily a graphing tool. Nocol is a monitoring
package which detects outages or errors on your devices. All data is
quantized in nocol and you lose granularity (which might or might not
be preferable).
The two packages are complements of each other.
- Where do I get NOCOL
- The distribution site is at
www.netplex-tech.com. It can also be downloaded via ftp from ftp.navya.com
- What about support ?
- NOCOL is freeware, and hence no official support is
available. However, it is a popular product and you can send messages
to the nocol-users@navya.com mailing list or search the Web
using any popular Internet search engine (Altavista, Excite) for your
queries.
You can also email queries to
nocol-support@navya.com which might grow larger in some distant
future.
- What is SNIPS ?
- NOCOL was originally developed in 1991 and released as
freeware. Since then, the software has almost completely been
rewritten and except for the old curses based 'netmon' interface,
not much else remains the same.
SNIPS (System and Network
Integrated Polling Software) is the next version of nocol
(after v4.2) with many new features such as distributed
monitoring for scalability, data graphing, parallel SNMP queries,
SNMPv2, MRTG interface for data collection and much more.
SNIPS will be announced on the nocol-users mailing list when
it is available.
- Is nocol Y2K compliant ?
- Yes. All events are logged to noclogd in the Unix timestamp
format, so the timestamps are not effected by the Y2K problem.
- What are the hardware requirements ?
- Nocol can run very comfortably on any Pentium-100 class Unix
machine with 64MB of RAM and monitor several hundred devices. It is
very lightweight in design and implementation.
- Should I run nocol as root ?
- NO! You should create a separate user such as 'nocol' or
'snips' and all monitors should be run by this user. The few monitors
which require root priveleges (such as pingmon or trapmon) are
installed as suid root in the nocol bin/ directory.
- I am getting lots of messages from
keepalive_monitors about restarting
- Either your system's ps command is not listing the complete
program name and keepalive_monitors is trying to restart the program
since it thinks its down or else the monitor being restarted cannot
write the pid or data file and is dying (incorrect owner and
permissions on the nocol/run directory).
If the monitor is not running, then try running it in debug mode
(most monitors will take the -d option for running in
debug mode).
- multiping gives error socket: Operation not
permitted
- multiping requires a raw socket, and needs to be installed
suid root. You probably did not run make root while
installing nocol. Check the ownership and permission of this program-
it must show mode -rwsr-x--x with owner root. If
not, do the following:
chown root multiping
chmod 4751 multiping
- Nothing is being logged to noclogd
- Events are logged ONLY when their state changes. Thus, an
event will be logged to noclogd if a site goes from info level to
warning level, etc.
- Can nocol handle SNMPv2 ?
- NOCOL currently uses the CMU SNMP software which does not implement
SNMPv2. This will be implemented in the next version (snips).
- How can I page myself when a site goes down?
- Assuming that you have an alphanumeric pager and can page yourself
using email or any other perl script, you can page yourself on a
particular event by using noclogd and piping the events to a simple
script such as utility/beep_oncall.
- How do I get notified when a site comes back up ?
- All monitors in nocol log events to noclogd based on the
worst of new severity or previous severity of an event.
Hence, when a site goes down first, it will be logged at 'warning'
level. If it comes back up, it will be marked as up but will be
logged at a loglevel of 'warning' since that was the old
severity. This mechanism allows you to not only detect when a device
goes critical, but also detect when the device comes back up.
- How do I get paged as soon as a site goes down ?
- In order to avoid false alarms (and prevent operators from getting
into the habit of wait-and-it-will-go-away), NOCOL will escalate any
events severity gradually. If you want to get paged or notified as
soon as a site or variable changes, you can watch it at the
Warning level instead of the Critical level.
- Does nocol run on windows NT ?
- Nope. No plans to port it at this time either.
- Who maintains NOCOL ?
- This software is currently maintained by
Vikas Aggarwal. Numerous
authors have made contributions which have been added to the package.