Do not get me wrong – I love Apple Inc. They are the bestest in the whole wide world. There are some things though that I think they need to sort out if they are going to be taken seriously in some markets that they are trying to get in to.
The problem that I am having at the moment is getting net-snmp to work on apple machines. Yes, every Apple box running OS X 10.4 has snmp on it already. I thought this would be great. The problem is though there is a serious bug on it, if you call certain MIB’s more then a couple of times, the daemon will jump too 100% CPU utilisation and just sit there… for ever.
I would love to raise a support case with apple – but for $195 per incident – to tell them that there is a bug with there own OS, I kinda think that is just plain rude. So I turned to the net-snmp developers. They don’t support the version of net-snmp bundled with apple boxes because it is too old.
So I then decided to move to the most recent version of net-snmp direct from the source. This doesn’t currently compile on an OS X box. And the net-snmp people are far from helpful about that – apparently because it is OS X.
To cut a long story short (there are other things that I have tried, many patches, compile options, older versions etc), as far as I can see at the moment there is no working snmp daemon / agent for OS X. Which makes it bloody hard to monitor these machines in anything remotely resembling an enterprise environment.
I am now lost as to why Apple would make and market servers, but not equip them with even the most elementary tools that they would need to go into a server farm. It is also annoying to me that they don’t seem to want to provide any support for their operating system. When it retails for $999 you expect at least some support!
The Seriously now… by Troy Kelly, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.