snmpd strangeness

[John Almberg]

On Nov 19, 2008, at 11:49 AM, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 10:57:50AM -0500, John Almberg wrote:
>> I just noticed something odd and am looking for ideas...
>>
>> As you can see from the top snippet below, snmpd is getting  
>> hammered by
>> something. As a comparison, the load averages for this quad-core   
>> box are
>> usually close to zero.
>>
>> I'm not even sure I'm using snmpd for anything... not even sure  
>> what it
>> is, precisely.
>>
>> I'm digging into docs at the moment, but any ideas much appreciated.
>
> I'm greatly concerned by the fact that you have a process on your
> machine taking up 103% CPU time (possible on a quad-core machine),
> taking up 2621MBytes of memory (RSS), yet you have no idea what it is,
> what SNMP is, or why said process is running on your machine.  :-)

That's an easy one to answer... Someone else installed FreeBSD on  
this machine. I have figured out MOST of what is on this box, but I'm  
occasionally surprised, like in this case.

However, now that I've read through the installer's notes, I see that  
he had exotic plans for snmp monitoring. From what I can tell, he  
never got it working properly.

In the meantime, I killed off the process. I had to take a  
sledgehammer to it, since a normal stop didn't work:

[identry at on:log]> sudo /usr/local/etc/rc.d/snmpd stop
Stopping snmpd.
Waiting for PIDS: 45136t, 45136op, 45136, 45136, 45136, 45136, 45136,  
45136, 45136, 45136, 45136, 45136, 45136, 45136, 45136, 45136, 45136,  
45136, 45136, 45136, 45136, 45136, 45136, 45136, 45136, 45136, 45136,  
45136, 45136, 45136, 45136, 45136, 45136, 45136, 45136, 45136, 45136,  
45136, 45136, 45136, 45136, 45136, 45136, 45136, 45136, 45136, 45136,  
45136, 45136, 45136, 45136, 45136, 45136, 45136, 45136, 45136, 45136,  
45136, 45136, 45136^C
[identry at on:log]> sudo kill -SIGKILL 45136

This makes me wonder if the process was just hung in some bad way,  
eating up cpu cycles?

Out of curiosity, I then restarted it. It seemed to run without  
problem after the restart, but after watching it for awhile, I  
stopped it again. I don't think it's doing anything useful at the  
moment.

Now I'm curious about snmp, so perhaps I'll try to figure out how to  
get it to something useful. This machine has 8 hard drives, and is  
located in Manhattan, so I would certainly like to be informed if one  
of the raid drives went on the blink. That was one of the things he  
was trying to get working.

Thanks: John