Enabling SNMP for Domino

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Update: HCL has updated both the files and the documentation in 2020. Below is still valid, but you can also follow the HCL documentation instead

At my company we use SNMP for Domino to monitor a couple of statistics on the Domino servers that we administer for some of our clients. The SNMP tool for Domino doesn’t look like it got a lot of development in recent years, but it still works. I had some reservations though about the way it should be installed according to the documentation in a Linux environment. The idea is that you copy the net-smtp* files from the Domino program directory to the /etc directory. If you stuck to the default paths that’s a:
cp /opt/hcl/domino/notes/latest/linux/net-snmtp* /etc/

From there you create a symlink in the /etc/rc.d/init.d directory to the net-snmpd.sh script and enable it from there using the old chkconfig command. That does mean though that you’re using an old 32-bit binary which didn’t get a lot of updates and therefore might have security leaks. We therefore checked if there was a simple way to use the default snmp binary from the OS repositories (we use CentOS for the Domino servers) and configure that for the Domino snmp program . That luckily turned out not too difficult. If you’re just using snmp for Domino, then you can simply use the Domino config file (net-snmpd.conf) for the OS snmp program. The procedure then becomes (assuming CentOS/RHEL and default paths):

vi /opt/hcl/domino/notes/latest/linux/lnsnmp.sh

and change the paths to actual paths of your installation (default you need to uncomment the LOTUSDIR and set it to LOTUSDIR=/opt/ibm/domino). The lnsnmp.sh contains some really old default path which hasn’t been used in many years, so you need to edit that file. Then just type:

yum install -y net-snmp
mv /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf /etc/snmp/snmpd.old
cp /opt/hcl/domino/notes/latest/linux/net-snmpd.conf /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf
systemctl start snmpd
systemctl enable snmpd
ln -f -s /opt/hcl/domino/notes/latest/linux/lnsnmp.sh /etc/init.d/lnsnmp
chkconfig lnsnmp start
chkconfig lnsnmp on

Please note: Each executable is started before enabling it. This saves you rebooting the OS, but also lets you check if everything works. Sort out any errors, before enabling the program.

If you use the firewall (which I recommend) you need to add snmp to the firewall-rules:

firewall-cmd --permanent --add-service=snmp
firewall-cmd --permanent-to-runtime

Finally in your notes.ini of the server you should add “quryset” and “intrcpt” to the ServerTasks line or start them through a program document, which runs on server startup. if you don’t want to restart the Domino server you can simply load these from the console.