Installing Zino¶

First, ensure you have a Python version beyween 3.9 and 3.12 available on your system. Second, we recommend creating a Python virtual environment, which is isolated from other Python software installed on your system, and installing Zino into that.

Zino also currently supports two separate SNMP back-end libraries:

PySNMP, a pure Python SNMP implementation, which should run right out-of-the-box (unfortunately, with poor performance).
netsnmp-cffi, a Python binding to the stable and performant Net-SNMP C library.

Running Zino with the PySNMP library¶

The current version of Zino selects the Net-SNMP backend by default. If you do not care about performance, are having a problem with the netsnmp-cffi implementation, or just do not want to deal with the hassle of adding another C library to you system, you can select the PySNMP back-end by changing the appropriate setting in zino.toml. Please see the section Configuring Zino for more details.

Running Zino with the Net-SNMP library¶

If you want to run Zino with the more performant C library, you need to first ensure this library (at least version 5.9) is installed on your system. E.g. on Debian, this would be provided by the libsnmp40 package.

If you’re on Linux, the netsnmp-cffi Python package should already have a version of this library bundled for most common versions of Linux and Python, and you might not have to do anything. If that is not the case, you may have to build the netsnmp-cffi C shim from source, in which case you will also need the Net-SNMP C header files and a C compiler toolchain.

Creating a Python virtual environment for Zino¶

To create a new virtual environment in the directory ./zino-env, run:

python -m venv ./zino-env

This virtual environment can now be activated in your shell, so that any further Python related commands that are run in your shell are running from inside the new environment:

. ./zino-env/bin/activate

Installing from PyPI¶

With your Zino virtual environment activated in your shell, run:

pip install zino

Installing from source¶

With your Zino virtual environment activated in your shell, clone the Zino source code directly from GitHub and install it from there:

git clone https://github.com/Uninett/zino.git
cd zino
pip install .

Running Zino for the first time¶

In order for Zino to function properly, you first need to make a minimal polldevs.cf configuration file, as described in the next section. You will also need a secrets file for authenticating clients.

However, at this point you can test that the zino command is available to run:

$ zino --help
usage: zino [-h] [--polldevs PATH] [--debug] [--stop-in N] [--trap-port PORT] [--user USER]

Zino is not OpenView

options:
  -h, --help        show this help message and exit
  --polldevs PATH   Path to polldevs.cf
  --debug           Set global log level to DEBUG. Very chatty!
  --stop-in N       Stop zino after N seconds.
  --trap-port PORT  Which UDP port to listen for traps on. Default value is 162. Any value below 1024 requires root privileges. Setting to 0
                    disables SNMP trap monitoring.
  --user USER       Switch to this user immediately after binding to privileged ports

Even if the Python virtual environment hasn’t been activated in your shell, you can still run Zino directly from inside this environment, like so:

./zino-env/bin/zino --help

By default, Zino will listen for incoming SNMP traps on UDP port 162. This port is privileged (less than 1024), however, which means that Zino needs to be started as ``root`` if you want to receive traps. In order to avoid running continuously with root privileges, the --user option can be used to tell Zino to switch to running as a less privileged user as soon as port 162 has been acquired.

Alternately, you can tell Zino to listen for traps on a non-privileged port, e.g. by adding --trap-port 1162 to the command line arguments, but this only works if you can configure your SNMP agents to send traps to this non-standard port. In any case, you can also tell Zino to skip listening for traps by specifying --trap-port 0.

Running Zino in production¶

In order to run Zino in a production setting, you should set up some service orchestration of the process. I.e. the process should run in the background, its log output should be directed to somewhere it will be persisted, and the process should automatically be started at boot time and restarted if it crashes during runtime.

If you’re on a system that uses systemd for service management, please read Controlling Zino with systemd