minor note on APC devices with SNMP

"Dan Mahoney, System Admin" <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.network.net-snmp.user
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Hey all,

I spent several hours wracking my brain trying to resolve this error with 
an APC 7902 switched rack PDU, but the issue also (I believe) applies to 
the AP9606 web/snmp management card.

I would do a get, then a set, and it would report success.  Then I'd log 
into the thing, see that my variable had indeed been set, and then I would 
try to undo the set, only to get:

% snmpset -c private -v1 72.9.101.19 sPDUOutletCtl.6 i 1
Error in packet.
Reason: (genError) A general failure occured

I grepped mailing lists for a while, found nothing, and it would work, 
seemingly on and off.

Until I figured it out:

the APC units only allow one person to be logged in at a time.  At the 
same time, if someone is logged in, their SNMP engine will throw the above 
error (I was causing it by logging in to check).

I'm mainly posting this in case anyone else has the issue.  I can 
understand why APC does this: you really don't want two people logged into 
a device toggling the status of a 120V (or more) breaker back and forth.

However, is there any way to set a delay and retry that will allow this 
command to be attempted every so many seconds in the event that this error 
IS returned?  Or would I have to do that from the calling code?  In that 
case, how do I evaluate the success or failure of the snmpset command 
(assume I'll be using a shell script).

-Dan

--

"It's three o'clock in the morning.  It's too late for 'oops'.  After
Locate Updates, don't even go there."

-Paul Baecker
  January 3, 2k
  Indeed, sometime after 3AM

--------Dan Mahoney--------
Techie,  Sysadmin,  WebGeek
Gushi on efnet/undernet IRC
ICQ: 13735144   AIM: LarpGM
Site:  http://www.gushi.org
---------------------------


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