SNMP and MRTG on Debian

SNMP server configuration

Firstly, you need an SNMP server to provide network interface statstics on demand:

# apt-get install snmpd

You need to edit the configuration for this as it does not allow any connections by default. With your favourite editor, edit:

/etc/snmp/snmpd.conf

Comment out the following (prefix with #):

com2sec paranoid default public

Insert the following underneath the commented out section:

com2sec readonly default public

That gives anyone with access to the SNMP server read-only access to the public community. This is the one that contains the interface statistics.

To apply the changes, restart snmpd:

/etc/init.d/snmpd restart

Make sure you firewall off any SNMP related ports so that you don't get any unwanted visitors (check netstat and /etc/services for port information).

Installation of MRTG

MRTG is the main collection and graphing component of the traffic monitoring solution I am presenting here. Firstly, install MRTG:

# apt-get install mrtg

You can manually or automatically generate the configuration file for mrtg. I would recommend doing it automatically as it is a lot easier. Issue the following command:

# cfgmaker --global 'WorkDir: /var/www/mrtg' \
  --output /etc/mrtg.cfg public@127.0.0.1

This will generate the configuration file. You then need to make an index file which contains a list of all of your interfaces. Issue the following command:

# indexmaker /etc/mrtg.cfg --columns=1 \
  --output /var/www/mrtg/index.html

You will now need to execute mrtg manually 3 times to create the required database files. Issue the following command 3 times sequentially. On the third run, you should see no errors being reported:

# mrtg

This is executed every 5 minutes by cron. The cron job was added by dpkg for you so you do not have to configure it.

Enjoy...