Comments on: Monitoring Remote Hosts With Cacti http://www.playingwithwire.com/2007/06/monitoring-remote-hosts-with-cacti/ The Internet Startup Blog Sat, 24 Oct 2009 19:07:30 +0000 hourly 1 By: Viktor Petersson http://www.playingwithwire.com/2007/06/monitoring-remote-hosts-with-cacti/#comment-12385 Sun, 30 Sep 2007 21:46:14 +0000 http://www.playingwithwire.com/2007/06/monitoring-remote-hosts-with-cacti/#comment-12385 François,
The reason why we utilize SSH-tunnels in this article is to avoid opening up ports in the firewall. Since you most likely already have port 22 opened for SSH, this setup requires a minimal amount of work.

Note that assumes that you connect between two machines over an non-secured network (ex. the Internet). If both your servers are on the same LAN, you might as well use a plain UDP connection (unless you want to make it more secure).

]]> By: François http://www.playingwithwire.com/2007/06/monitoring-remote-hosts-with-cacti/#comment-12383 Sun, 30 Sep 2007 21:23:04 +0000 http://www.playingwithwire.com/2007/06/monitoring-remote-hosts-with-cacti/#comment-12383 Nice article! But I don’t really understand why you need the SSH tunnels! Anyhow, a clear connection will be made from the cacti server to the remote server on the 161 port. So, why don’t you configure cacti with those informations:
Description: server1.xyz.net
Hostname: server1.xyz.net
Host Template: ucd/net SNMP Host
SNMP Community: public
SNMP Version: Version 1
SNMP Port: 161

Here, you need neither changing udp to tcp nor ssh tunnels. It seems a lot easier to me but I may have missed something…

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