Cacti is ignoring hash marks in interface aliases

Posted by Matt Simmons on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Matt Simmons
Published on 2012-09-21T14:18:36Z Indexed on 2012/09/21 15:40 UTC
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I'm attempting to set up Cacti to monitor a router's interfaces, and I'm having trouble getting the graph templates to show the information that I'd like.

Our interface configuration looks like this:

 interface GigabitEthernet3/6
  description WalljackNumber # Server info 
  no ip address
  no shutdown
  switchport
  switchport access vlan 116
  switchport mode access
  ip dhcp snooping trust
  spanning-tree portfast

The "Server Info" string is really just the machine name, and a short relevant description, such as "PolarSprings vmnic2". The important part appears to be that it follows the hashmark.

When I run snmpwalk, I get the proper output:

 IF-MIB::ifAlias.230 = STRING: WalljackNumber # Server info

But in Cacti, when I go into the graph templates and set the title to this:

 |host_description| - Traffic - |query_ifName| (|query_ifAlias|)

All that shows up in the graph is:

switchname - Traffic - Gi3/6 (WalljackNumber #) 

Which strikes me as a little weird. What I suppose MAY be happening is that somewhere in the cacti stream, it's interpreting # as being a comment and stripping everything after, but I'm not sure.

I was hoping someone could tell me that this was a known documented behavior, or that I could change it in a setting that I wasn't aware of. The alternative answer is to change the delimiter from # to something else, but I've got over a thousand lit switchports on an old college infrastructure, and I'm not sure what else might be relying on them.

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