[HamWAN PSDR] HamWAN use cases [was: hamwan.net DDNS]

[Nigel Vander Houwen]

Dean,

We've talked about graphing temperature before, but I've found that it has VERY little to do with the outside temperature. You'll see some effect as the outside temperature fluctuates, but it will be muted. Additionally, internal sources, are much more powerful in terms of changing the internal temperature. An active modem sending data will look rather different than an idle one. Additionally different modems seem to have different "baselines" and yours may look rather different than mine under similar conditions. So beyond knowing if your modem is on fire, I'm not certain there's a lot to be gained.

And regarding graphing voltages, I'm similarly not certain there's much to be gained from that. We've used the voltage display to check on some of our cables to make sure they weren't offering crazy resistance, and potentially dropping voltage as current needs increased during high activity, but for non-specific testing, it seems to be that you'd be graphing how well regulated a cheap wall-wart is. As long as it's putting out enough to run the modem, it shouldn't be a problem.

If graphing these things is something we'd like to try, I can certainly create graphs for them in Cacti, but just haven't done so for the reasons above, summarily, they don't seem to offer terribly useful data.

Personally, I haven't worked all too much with The Dude, but what I have seen of it is annoying, so I don't use it. Bart may have more insights here, as I think (at least for a while) he used it a bit more than I did.

I will re-check the OIDs for wireless signal strength. Maybe they've been adjusted since I first was looking. Originally, when I was looking, there were certainly more OIDs, but not all of them actually reported data. The OIDs we chose to use (the MAC dependent ones) were the ones that worked. If in the more recent releases a non-specific OID worked, that would make things much simpler in terms of setting up SNMP monitoring.

Nigel
K7NVH

On May 6, 2014, at 11:28 PM, Dean Gibson AE7Q <hamwan at ae7q.com> wrote:

> 
> On 2014-04-22 16:23, Dean Gibson AE7Q wrote:
>> 
>> On 2014-04-22 16:06, Nigel Vander Houwen wrote:
>>> Hey Dean,
>>> 
>>> Can you give me the output of
>>> 
>>> /interface wireless registration-table print oid
>>> 
>>> On your modem? Mikrotik decided to make the OIDs different based on what you're connected to, and this is easier than snmpwalking it.
> 
> Actually, when you SNMP-walk it, it appears that the signal strength and TX/RX rates are duplicated.  One place is specific to the connected MAC address (I thought that was weird until I thought about it a bit), and the other place has no relation to the connection.
> 
>>> 
>>> Thanks, Nigel
>> 
>> Having worked very briefly w/ SNMP (and hating it), I understand COMPLETELY (grin).
> 
> OK, where's voltage and temperature  ???
> 
> /system health print oid
>                voltage: .1.3.6.1.4.1.14988.1.1.3.8.0
>            temperature: .1.3.6.1.4.1.14988.1.1.3.10.0
> 
> I can't find the message where someone recommended "The Dude", but I've installed it.  The beta version (4.0b3) seems to be better in general than the current release version (3.6), although the graphing in the latter uses better scaling, in my opinion:  One ought to be able to turn dynamic scaling (vertical axis) on and off, and in the latter case, specify the limits.  Oh, well;  it's gotten me to probing around in the SNMP map, and I have "Dude" charting voltage and temperature (the above OIDs give them in TENTHS).  The latter is more interesting, because (duh) it goes up and down w/ the outside temperature.  Maybe Bart or Tom can associate that with propagation (grin).
> 
> 
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