So many moons ago I started implementing ‘the dude’. Recently, I thought I would revive that project. ‘The Dude’ is really one neat piece of software. After messing with it some I was trying to get the CPU stats to be recorded, then I learned that it collects them through SNMP. Now SNMP is of course not enabled by default so I needed a method of enabling it. So SolarWinds makes a tool called the SNMP Enabler for Windows  this looked like the perfect tool but it took some jimmying to get it working. So in order to install SNMP (this is for windows XP) it needs the install media. So luckily I just downloaded a copy of Windows XP service Pack 3 from the microsoft licensing site. (Not having to slipstream service pack 3, bonus!) I extracted the .iso to a network share, now this is important extract the whole thing not just the i386 folder (this hung me up). Also download yourself a copy of pstools so that you have psexec (you will need this for the network install). Click the Settings ‘tab’, Click the Psexec and point it to the path of your PsExec.exe (oh it seems if you are logged onto the box as an admin it behaves more nicely as well, maybe with UAC off) I check marked the Override Graphic Acceleration, and Show Debug Window On Error. Then click the Add button to add the installation data location. I chose Windows Xp Pro, SP3 and then for the path \\seattle-server4\installcds\xpsp3slipstreamed (not to the i386 folder, up one folder)

I’m not sure if all those settings are necessary but it wasn’t working and then after clicking a couple of things it magically started working, so there you go. On occasion the ‘push’ of SNMP won’t take, I just rerun it and usually the second time it will work, go figure. So now my ‘the dude’ shows more nifty stats! Next up, I want to learn how to make a plugin to monitor a specific service!