SNMP Noob

[Gerry]

I would like a web-based printer monitor. Looks like SNMP is the best method to use, but I've not used it before. Most of our printers are HP, but we have a few Dell's and some photocopiers. Anyone know of any good guides for SNMP noobs? Any good resources for help programming my own monitor? (PHP/Perl preferrable).

Thanks.

[dhicks]

Any good resources for help programming my own monitor? (PHP/Perl preferrable).

I simply wrote a script that used the shell to run snmpget, but I'm sure there's SNMP libraries for Perl or PHP available - the Wikipedia article on SNMP has a list of libraries at the end:

[ame=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Network_Management_Protocol]Simple Network Management Protocol - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

For HP printers I found the following:

snmpget -v 2c -c public 10.0.0.166 hrPrinterStatus.1

gives you the status of a printer at IP address 10.0.0.166. snmpwalk lets you see every SNMP variable returned by the printer, e.g.:

snmpwalk -v 2c -c public 10.0.0.166

So you can turn the printer on, record the "okay" settings, then pull the paper tray out or something and record the "not okay" settings and do a diff of the two.

--
David Hicks

[Arthur]

If I get the time I would quite like to setup Cacti to monitor printers via SNMP. It looks really good.

[mrwITch]

I would like a web-based printer monitor. Looks like SNMP is the best method to use, but I've not used it before. Most of our printers are HP, but we have a few Dell's and some photocopiers. Anyone know of any good guides for SNMP noobs? Any good resources for help programming my own monitor? (PHP/Perl preferrable).

Thanks.

Haven't studied any of these
PHP: SNMP - Manual

Net-SNMP

and perhaps something to do some prototyping with
NSNMP - fast, flexible, low-level, pure-Perl SNMP library - search.cpan.org

[ChrisH]

I would like a web-based printer monitor. Looks like SNMP is the best method to use, but I've not used it before. Most of our printers are HP, but we have a few Dell's and some photocopiers. Anyone know of any good guides for SNMP noobs? Any good resources for help programming my own monitor? (PHP/Perl preferrable).

Thanks.

Use Nagios. Plenty of threads on here about it. It uses plugins, that in turn uses SNMP to get the information you need.