[PLUG] Agentx - what is it?

Dale Snell ddsnell at frontier.com
Thu Nov 6 01:16:53 UTC 2014


On Wed, 5 Nov 2014 17:00:56 -0800
website reader <website.reader3 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I just now discovered a symbolic link in my /var folder area called
> "agentx" which links to the /run/agentx executable (which is not
> there)
> 
> Should I be concerned about this?  Just a quick glance seems to
> reveal that it is both a monitoring program and controller for the
> Linux kernel.  It appears to be some type of snmp program.
> 
> My machine is openSuse v13.1 linux.
> 
> I appreciate some feedback here, thanks.
> 
> Randall

Okay, here's what yum had to say about agentx:

$ yum search agentx
<yummy-blither deleted>
amavisd-new-snmp.noarch : Exports amavisd SNMP data
$ yum info amavisd-new-snmp
<yummy-blither deleted, Description: follows>

This package contains the program amavisd-snmp-subagent, which can be
used as a SNMP AgentX, exporting amavisd statistical counters database
(snmp.db) as well as a child process status database (nanny.db) to a
SNMP daemon supporting the AgentX protocol (RFC 2741), such as
NET-SNMP.

It is similar to combined existing utility programs amavisd-agent and
amavisd-nanny, but instead of writing results as text to stdout, it
exports data to a SNMP server running on a host (same or remote),
making them available to SNMP clients (such a Cacti or mrtg) for
monitoring or alerting purposes.

Researching RFC 2741 is left as an exercise for the student.  :-)

Since the agentx program isn't there, I'd delete the symlink; it
serves no good purpose.

Hope this helps.

--Dale

-- 
"I recall hearing that highly-classified data must be destroyed by
physically shredding the medium.  Yes, throw your disk drive in
the shredder!  (Just imagine the class of machinery required to
digest an RA81 HDA.)"    -- Mark Wood on linux-kernel
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