MRTG & tracking disk-space on NetWare

The MRTG tool is one that I've had a lot of experience with at my old job, and we use here. MRTG & Netware is something that has had some coverage already. The most notible of that is the changelog for MRTG include certain very interesting entries:

Changes 2.10.15, 2004-08-08

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From: NormW 

* patches for netware support

Changes 2.10.14

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From: Norm 

* make mrtg work on netware

My latest work with it is to take a perl script I've been using for ages to do disk-space monitoring of Netware and drop the data into a database, and tweak the script so it can be used by MRTG's external-script target syntax. Since the main problem to solve is how to extract and translate the data, and I already had solved that problem, it didn't take long to rejigger how the output is delivered.

I even have an example!

Not much data in there yet since I haven't had it running all that long. But it uses SNMP to extract data and graph it. The script can be specified to report either free-space or used-space. It is my experience that managers are much more interesting in the "how much resource do we have left" question than the "how much resources are we using" question. For "have left" can be used in planning, and "use now" is already paid for.