mib2agt on HPUX11.00

[Wenlong Xu]

Hi there,

Could any one tell me what "mib2agt" is all about? Is it an OpenView thing or just some management agent for HP-UX 11.00 in general? (I knew for sure that our system does not have OpenView Installed, but per the OS patch release note, it seems to have something to do with OV...). What does it do? What data does it collect? What kind of events will push its' size to 466MB?

It looks like that OS patch PHSS_24945 has fixed the "slightly memory leak" problem in mib2agt...my scripts still running to verify this...will let it run over the long weekend. without this patch, our application run into problems in 4 days. Now, 3 days and 23 housrs have passed. Still looks good! So, OS patch does matter! (a response for "OS patch, why?" message posted by other folks, good discussion! guys!).

Thanks for help!

[James Murtagh · Accepted solution]

Hi,

The mib2agt is a subagent for the snmpdm master agent. An SNMP MIB (Management Information Base) is a set of MIB objects. Each object represents a set of status or configuration information about a managed (network) device. SNMP dynamically retrieves the values of the objects when a request is made of it.

The SNMP MIB is defined by the Internet Standards Organisation (ISO). As mentioned, MIB definitions are grouped into MIB modules. These modules are structured similar to a UNIX filesystem tree, with several branches and pieces of information, and is defined by RFC 1213 : Management Information Base of Network Management of TCP/IP internets : MIB II.

So, no, it is not unique to HPUX, but is integrated into OV NNM. By using the NNM MIB Browser you can query/set MIB object values for example.

So, as you can imagine, the more network managed devices you have the more information (memory) the mib2agt will consume.

Hope this helps.

[Steven Sim Kok Leong]

Hi,

In addition, HP-UX's mib2agt allows monitoring of CPU load, memory, swap, uptime , no. of concurrent processes, no. of concurrent established TCP connections etc etc.

Apart from OV NNM, MRTG is also commonly used with it (via the use of snmpget to query specific OID values in the MIB) to allow graphical monitoring of system performance over the web.

hope this helps. Regards.

Steven Sim Kok Leong

[Bill Hassell]

The mib2agt provides information to network monitoring tools. If you are not running network monitoring tools (like OpenView's Network Node Manager) then you can kill the process. Additionally, you might want to turn off all SNMP (the Simple Network Management Protocol) processes by setting the control values =0 rather than =1 in /etc/rc.config.d.

The massive (not slight) memory leak is a well known defect in mib2agt for 11.0 and the patch fixes that problem. But there is no reason to run it at all if you don't have active monitoring software running somewhere in your company. Even if you do, turning of these processes just keeps the box from responding to SNMP status requests.

[Wenlong Xu]

Hi James, Steven and Bill.

Thanks a lot for the helps!

I hope you folks all have a wonderful long weekend!

Thanks again!
-Wenlong Xu