Command line utilities provided in NAV

In addition to various daemon and cron job programs, NAV provides some useful command line utilities to control NAV or work with NAV data.

nav

nav is the most central program to control NAV’s background processes and cron jobs, regardless of whether you are running under SysV init system, systemd or other process control systems.

If NAV doesn’t appear to be doing anything, the first order of business is checking the state of its background processes with the command nav status

Usage

navcheckservice

This utility can be used to test servicemon checker plugins against arbitrary hosts (i.e. not necessarily registered in NAV).

Usage

Available handler plugins

These handler plugins are currently available from servicemon:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'nav'

navdf

This command is useful to generate lists of devices registered in NAV. Used without arguments, it will print out the sysname of every NAV-registered device.

It is mostly a programmers interface to filtering the device list: It takes an argument that must be valid Python code and a valid Django QuerySet filtering function, and therefore requires a bit of knowledge about how the NAV database is modeled in the Django ORM.

Please refer to the Django QuerySet documentation for more information about how to build filters.

Usage

Recipes

List only GSW and GW category devices:

navdf "filter(category__id__in=(('GW', 'GSW')))"

List only Juniper devices:

navdf "filter(type__vendor__id='juniper')"

List only Cisco switches:

navdf "filter(type__vendor__id='cisco', category_id__in=(('SW', 'EDGE')))"

List only switches in the room 101:

navdf "filter(room__id='101', category_id__in=(('SW', 'EDGE')))"

navdump

This command can dump SeedDB data into CSV text files, which can later be re-imported in another NAV instance’s SeedDB bulk import feature.

Typical usage patterns are described in the data migration howto.

Usage

naventity

This SNMP-specific utility can query the contents of a NAV-registered device’s ENTITY-MIB::entPhysicalTable and output the entity hierarchy to the terminal. This is a useful way of discovering what a device is actually reporting about its physical contents to NAV, or if it even supports this standard mechanism.

The ENTITY-MIB is defined by the IETF RFC 6933, and is the primary way NAV learns about the pysical innards of a network device.

Usage

navoidverify

This command is useful for simple SNMP MIB conformance testing of NAV-registered devices in bulk.

It takes an SNMP OID as its only argument, and a list of NAV-registered device name in its standard input: It then runs SNMP GET-NEXT commands for the given OID against all the listed devices (using the SNMP credentials stored in NAV), testing to see whether the device response is from within a subtree of the requested OID. Any device that responds with a value from the subtree will have its name printed back to the standard output.

Usage

Recipes

Let’s say you are interested in figuring which of your devices support the CISCO-VLAN-MEMBERSHIP-MIB::vmMembershipSummaryTable object. First, you need the full OID of this object, and then you can test it against all your devices thus (by also utiliziing the navdf command mentioned above):

$ snmptranslate -On CISCO-VLAN-MEMBERSHIP-MIB::vmMembershipSummaryTable
.1.3.6.1.4.1.9.9.68.1.2.1
$ navdf | navoidverify .1.3.6.1.4.1.9.9.68.1.2.1
example-cisco-sw1.example.org
example-cisco-sw2.example.org
...

navpgdump

This command can aid in dumping all or parts of the NAV PostgreSQL database into a text format (raw SQL commands) suitable for restoring on a different PostgreSQL server or NAV instance.

If a full dump/restore cycle is needed, you may be better off using the command line tools provided by your PostgreSQL distribution itself, but if you want to apply NAV-specific filtering to the data, this command is useful.

In particular, this command is used by NAV developers to do partial dumps of production data and load these into a development installation for testing/debugging and development of new features.

Typical usage patterns are described in the data migration howto.

Usage

navsnmp

This little utility is useful when you want to use NET-SNMP command line utilities to talk to your NAV-registered network devices.

Supply a NAV-registered device’s name as its argument, and it will output the device’s SNMP credentials (as stored in NAV, if any) as valid NET-SNMP command line options. In this way, you don’t need to remember which SNMP version, community or IP address a device has - you only need to remember the first part of its name.

Usage

Recipes

To walk the ENTITY-MIB::entPhysicalTable table of example-sw.example.org:

snmpwalk $(navsnmp example-sw) ENTITY-MIB::entPhysicalTable

navsyncdb

This is the central command line utility to create the NAV database schema in PostgreSQL and keep the schema in sync when upgrading to newer NAV versions.

Run with the correct privileges, it can both create the database user and the database before initializing the schema, or even drop an exsting NAV database completely if you want to start from scratch.

Its usage is described in most of the available installation guides. When installing NAV from Debian packages, you rarely need to interact with this command, though.

Usage

navsynctypes

If you manage multiple NAV instances, this useful utility can assist you in making sure your device type registry is kept in sync between instances. It may be tedious to use SeedDB to manually assign proper names and descriptions for all the device types auto-created by ipdevpoll during the course of its run, but if you manage multiple NAV instances, you don’t want to have to repeat these manual steps.

When run on NAV instance A, his command line utility outputs to its standard output a set of SQL commands that can be run on NAV instance B’s PostgreSQL server to ensure that NAV instance B has at least all the same device types as instance A, with the same descriptions etc.

Usage

navuser

This commands interacts with the NAV web interface’s user registry, enabling you to use the command line to add new user accounts, set account passwords, lock/unlock accounts or give admin privileges to select accounts.