Fun with Proxmox, PRTG, SNMP, and a boatload of Mea Cupla

The Elitedesk 800 G4 Mini PC is just about 100% built, hardware-wise. I am waiting for the VGA Flex IO port to arrive. Looks like I put it in the cart, but did not press “Buy” for a few days, so, mea culpa.

I have Proxmox installed. I noticed a LONG while back that you should never install a Linux OS until you have the hardware set, so, of course, I had to reinstall after I replaced the 4GB RAM with 32GB and added in the 2TB NVMe drive for the VMs to run on. I’d already replaced the 128GB SSD with a 500GB on that I had on hand. Again, mea culpa, but this gave me a chance to experience installing Proxmox for a second time, so that is lemonade.

This lead to the very interesting realization that Windows 10 install on Proxmox is not as straight forward as, say VirtualBox or VMware. Fortunately, I found this idiot’s web site that details this process. Following his outline, I soon was sitting through the Windows Update process. I actually used an old Windows10.iso file that I already had on my PC, but this stopped getting updates at version 1511. Yes, that is from 2015. Man, we’ve been saddled with Windows10 for a long time now.

I already had PRTG installed, configured, and populating at this point, so I really, really did not want to have to blow away the current install and rebuild from scratch. I took a chance and downloaded a fresh Windows10.iso file, as described in the idiot’s web site, mounted it up in Proxmox, and ran the update on the Windows install. It worked! This is good because 1511 was stopping me from moving forward with PRTG, as it needed some newer version of some .Net library. Mission accomplished.

I spent a good part of yesterday and most of today messing about with PRTG and trying to get as many of my devices monitored as possible. The downside of all of this is that once my 30-day trial is up, I will be capped at 100 sensors, which I am well beyond at this point and still adding. In fact, that brings me to why I am making a blog post.

Installing SNMP on a Linux host (or server) for monitoring:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install snmp snmpd
sudo apt-get install snmp-mibs-downloader;sudo download-mibs
!
sudo nano /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf
   # this will make snmpd listen on all interfaces
   agentAddress  udp:161
   # a read only community 'public' and the source network* is defined
   rocommunity public 10.25.68.0/24
   # Change " rocommunity public  default    -V systemonly" to
    rocommunity public  default    -V all
   # Stop killing the syslog server
   dontLogTCPWrappersConnects yes
!
sudo service snmpd restart
sudo service snmpd status
!
snmptranslate -Tp
sudo snmpwalk -v 2c -c public localhost

If I ever get back to playing with Ansible, this will be another one that gets added to the fresh install template file. I’ve found very similar steps on other sites, but I am going to link to this one because it is the best presentation.