Network Monitoring and Management packages are incredibly useful, but most users can’t have someone sitting in front of the Network Management PC 24/7. For this reason, Hirschmann’s Industrial HiVision allows you to setup E-mail alerts on events of your choosing. Let’s take a look at how to set this up.
Industrial HiVision does not natively support sender e-mail accounts that require TLS/SSL authentication like Gmail, but we can use a third party SSL tunneling client called Stunnel to help with this.
During the installation process you will come across a command prompt window asking for various information; this information is used to create an SSL certificate for Stunnel. DO NOT skip this process or Stunnel will not function properly. Stunnel is configured with a text based configuration file titled “stunnel.conf”. You can find the file in the directory Stunnel is installed to or from selecting Start > All Programs > stunnel > Edit stunnel.conf.
During the installation process you will come across a command prompt window asking for various information; this information is used to create an SSL certificate for Stunnel. DO NOT skip this process or Stunnel will not function properly. Stunnel is configured with a text based configuration file titled “stunnel.conf”. You can find the file in the directory Stunnel is installed to or from selecting Start > All Programs > stunnel > Edit stunnel.conf.
Once you’ve opened the stunnel.conf file in Notepad you’ll be presented with the default configuration. Select all the text in the file and delete it. You will now have a blank text file, copy only the bold text I’ve posted below and paste it into the configuration file. Save the configuration and now you can start the Stunnel runtime. If Stunnel was running then you’ll need to open the GUI and select Configuration > Reload stunnel.conf from the menu bar.
client = yes
[SMTP]
accept = 127.0.0.1:25
connect = smtp.gmail.com:465
[SMTP]
accept = 127.0.0.1:25
connect = smtp.gmail.com:465
The accept command is used to specify the host that will accept the connection and the connect command is used to specify the remote host. If you’re using a connection other than Gmail, you should only have to change the connect server and port.
Now that you have Stunnel configured you may want to run it as a service. First, you’ll need to install Stunnel as a service by going to Start > All Programs > stunnel > Service install. A successful dialog should appear. You can now find Stunnel in your Window’s Services list. Set the service to start Automatically.
Now you configure the e-mail account in IHV under Preferences>Advanced>External Applications
Next configure the Event Action:
Finally you create the alarm and set the action that will occur on the alarm. This alarm was imported from the alarm summary and will send an e-mail when Port 1 link goes down on the 51 switch.
To test, I took the link down and received an e-mail with the following text:
Info from 192.168.3.51 Port 1/Link: Link is Down (9/2/10 6:09:44 PM)
Success! Now we can set up additional alerts for any events we feel warrant attention.
Links of Interest
