Comments on: monitoring Airport basestations with MRTG

By: Fnord. » Blog Archive » Cacti, SNMP, Airport Express and MIB: A quiet leap forward

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:39:46 +0000

[...] SNMP-capable hardware. My newer Airport Express (b/g/n, part number MB321LL/A) has full support, but the previous b/g (part number ?????) does not. My RV042 has SNMP, but the more common WRT54 series doesn’t unless you install the third-party Tomato firmware. (More Airport info is here and here.) [...]

By: james

james — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 05:22:54 +0000

so I'm running MRTG over my Time Capsule just fine. My config was generated using regular old cfkmaker. I'm getting graphs out of it that look like this:

By: james

james — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 01:06:28 +0000

A lot of people appear to be hitting this site looking for further information regarding SNMP and Apple Airport devices. I recently purchased an Apple Timecapsule so my interest has once again risen.

I noticed this conversation going on at Apple’s discussion site http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7902333
and have added my 2 cents.

I’ll post something shortly here after I’ve had a chance to investigate further.

By: james

james — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 00:00:36 +0000

Rob, not to a satisfactory degree, no. It’s turned out to be much easier to monitor the ports on a managed switch that each of the Airports are plugged into.

By: Rob

Rob — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 09:02:58 +0000

Did you ever had succes graphing datatraffic using this ?

Im currently trying monitor two Airport expresses on mrtg with snmp but the graphs never show any lines.

Rob

By: James Christopher Murty

James Christopher Murty — Fri, 24 Dec 2004 01:11:56 +0000

I did have some successes with an airport express base station some time back.
The relevant lines that needed to be added to mrtg.cfg to access the MIB file were:
LoadMIBs: /usr/share/snmp/mibs/airport-extreme.txt
to load the MIB (download it from the link above and place it in /usr/share/snmp/mibs/
Then to access stuff, use something like:
###################################################################### # System: Base Station 1 # Description: Apple Base Station V3.84 Compatible # Contact: # Location: Top Floor - West End ###################################################################### ### Interface 2 >> Descr: 'mirror0' | Name: '' | Ip: '192.168.1.30' | Eth: '00-0d-93-cb-0c-c9' ### Target[192.168.1.30_2]: physicalInterfaceNumRX.3&physicalInterfaceNumTX.3:@192.168.1.30: SetEnv[192.168.1.30_2]: MRTG_INT_IP="192.168.1.30" MRTG_INT_DESCR="mirror0" MaxBytes[192.168.1.30_2]: 1250000 Title[192.168.1.30_2]: Traffic Analysis for 2 -- Base Station 1 PageTop[192.168.1.30_2]:

`Traffic Analysis for 2 -- Base Station 1`



 








   System:      Base Station 1 in Top Floor - West End
   Maintainer:  
   Description: mirror0  
   ifType:      ethernetCsmacd (6)
   ifName:      
   Max Speed:   1250.0 kBytes/s
   Ip:          192.168.1.30 ()

The results here are less than satisfactory as only the number of bytes in and out of the wireless interface are recorded – and not the desired bits/second.

By: Martijn

Martijn — Thu, 23 Dec 2004 21:30:56 +0000

I have my dsl modem connected to the WAN interface of an Airport Exterme. Then I have two airport express devices connected with WDS. For none of the devices the wireless connection shows up. I know there is a special MIB for it (its on the cd delivered with the device) but do not know how to adress it. Damn….

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 23 Dec 2004 15:42:58 +0000

Hmm…for me, the 1st interface was the loopback and therefore was commented out. The 2nd interface claimed to be the ethernet interface and it was set correctly, but I never see any traffic on it (I think because the only ethernet traffic I have is grouped into interface 3), the 3rd interface was marked as my pppd interface (basically the PPPoE conecntion to my dsl provider, and though it was marked as speed zero, I changed to be the speed of my DSL, uncommented it and everything works fine for that interface. I wish the wireless interface showed up.

By: Martijn

Martijn — Mon, 20 Dec 2004 23:15:02 +0000

I don’t understand, the password is right, i get the config file but all interfaces are commented out because of zero speed. Any ideas?

By: jpmat296

jpmat296 — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 00:30:27 +0000

I have an Airport Express and I have just finished to configure MRTG for it !

The most difficult issue was to understand that airport station password must be given as comunity ID to access all SNMP informations. Without password, they are only minimal informations and MRTG can’t work.

To use cfgmaker on Airport station with password, you must do :

cfgmaker password@ip_airport

By: James Christopher Murty

James Christopher Murty — Sat, 04 Dec 2004 06:07:46 +0000

Martijn, /sw/bin/cfgmaker will do most of the work for you, just point it at your router and pipe the output into a text file by typing something like:
cfgmaker ADDRESS_OF_ROUTER > mrtg.cfg
The only value you’ll definitely need to change in the resulting file is the WordDir – which is where MRTG should be generating the html and images.
Mine looks a bit like this:
# Created by # /usr/local/bin/cfgmaker 192.168.1.50 # Global Config Options WorkDir: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mrtg # Global Defaults # to get bits instead of bytes and graphs growing to the right Options[_]: growright, bits, noborder, transparent ################################################################## # System: router.murty.org # Description: ADSL Router, VxWorks SNMPv1/v2c Agent, Conexant System, Inc. # Contact: James Christopher Murty # Location: Hearth ################################################################## # Interface 1 >> Descr: '[mac0]-Ethernet,-Conexant-Systems,-Inc.' | Name: '' | Ip: '127.0.0.1' | Eth: ' ' # Target[192.168.1.1_1]: -1:public@192.168.1.1: SetEnv[192.168.1.1_1]: MRTG_INT_IP="127.0.0.1" MRTG_INT_DESCR="[mac0]-Ethernet,-Conexant-Systems,-Inc." MaxBytes1[192.168.1.1_1]: 192000 MaxBytes2[192.168.1.1_1]: 32768 Title[192.168.1.1_1]: Traffic Analysis for 1 -- router.murty.org PageTop[192.168.1.1_1]:

`Traffic Analysis for 1 -- router.murty.org`



 








   System:      router.murty.org in Hearth
   Maintainer:  James Christopher Murty
   Description: [mac0]-Ethernet,-Conexant-Systems,-Inc.  
   ifType:      ethernetCsmacd (6)
   ifName:      
   Max Speed:   1.5 Mbits/s / 256 Kbits/sec
   Ip:          127.0.0.1 (localhost)

By: Martijn

Martijn — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 22:28:39 +0000

Hi James,

I tried to get it working but could not figure out how the config file should be. Didn’t find it on internet and no help in forums either. Could you give me a headstart by telling me what I should put in in the config file?

Regards,
Martijn

System:	Base Station 1 in Top Floor - West End
Maintainer:
Description:	mirror0
ifType:	ethernetCsmacd (6)
ifName:
Max Speed:	1250.0 kBytes/s
Ip:	192.168.1.30 ()

System:	router.murty.org in Hearth
Maintainer:	James Christopher Murty
Description:	[mac0]-Ethernet,-Conexant-Systems,-Inc.
ifType:	ethernetCsmacd (6)
ifName:
Max Speed:	1.5 Mbits/s / 256 Kbits/sec
Ip:	127.0.0.1 (localhost)