I've seen a lot of favorable comments and reviews here and elsewhere
about AirWave (network management app). We've been using it ourselves
for a while and really value the info we get from it ..... when it's
working properly.
It's gotten to the point where we have to reboot it several times a day;
the load average creeps up to 12 or higher, and it becomes unusable.
Even after a fresh reboot, usage is only barely tolerable. We can't
depend upon it in a critical situation. We investigated putting it on
new hardware (we're upgrading a number of our net mgt server platforms
to Sun X4200s running Linux), but were informed by the AirWave folks
that they don't have 64-bit support. Not only that, but in further
discussions, we learned that most of the components for AirWave are
written in Perl, which isn't exactly the most efficient programming
platform. Disillusionment sinks in .... it's like learning from the
Easter Bunny that there is no Santa Claus!
So, my questions to those of you that do wax enthusiastically to this
day about AirWave:
1) How many WAPs are you currently managing with a single Airwave
appliance?
2) What is the (average) polling interval used?
3) Do you have multiple Airwave servers, and if so, how many WAPs
managed on each one? How do you plan to scale--additional separate
servers, or a beefier single server?
4) What are your server specs? (Vendor, OS, number of CPUs and their
speed, amount of RAM, number of active NICs, etc.)
5) How is performance on your server? Do you notice performance
degradation over time? About how much memory is used under average
load? How busy are the CPUs under average load? How much network
traffic is generated from polling?
Also, optionally:
6) How do you manage security concerns? (i.e. most Airwave processes
running as root, installed in /root, root ssh remote logins enabled by
default on default port, most components are written in Perl which can
easily be modified if the machine is compromised, compilers are
installed locally, etc.etc.etc.)
Inquiring minds want to know (and want to get the statistics we need to
manage the network).
Thanks in advance!
-- Jim Gogan ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Director, Networking
ITS
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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