Procurve stacks and SNMP

[Eric Praetzel]

We use ONA http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1251160 for network administration. I've started setting up stacks with HP Procurve equipment and they didn't work with ONA as it is. I then started using snmpwalk to walk the whole device, then diff non-stack and stacks in order to identify the proper OIDs to use.
I've used Baystack stacks for a decade and when switches are stacked they all appear as a single big switch via SNMP queries. I get the impression that this isn't true for procurve switches; but that doesn't make sense because one would typically setup Procurve stack switches without IP address and without an IP one can't SNMP to them.

[André Beck · Accepted solution]

Eric,

I have to admit I never looked into ProCurve "stacks" for the reasons already discussed here just some threads down. But in the implementation that probably was the prototype here (Cisco XL switch clusters), the implementation simply used a suffix to the SNMP community to address any non-master cluster member. IIRC something like

:public --> talks to master MIB
:public@2 --> talks to member 2 MIB

etc. I wouldn't be too surprised if HP did things the same way. There isn't much else of a subaddress you could use (unless you frell with the OIDs themselves, e.g. by prefixing them with some enterprise MIB parent encoding the method and member).

IIRC BayStacks use real stacking (the chassis achieve a unified single-hop switch identity), so getting a single MIB is just a side effect of the otherwise superior implementation. ProCurve "stacks" (like Cisco XL clusters) are just a management simplification hack that introduces an unnecessary management SPoF. IMO they are a marketing device (for feature checklists and a bad surprise for people expecting actual stacking).

HTH,
Andre.