[ale] OpenSource NMS Recommendations?

[brucelists at bellsouth.net]

Hey all,

      I'm considering putting in a basic NMS for my lab. Have any of you worked with open source NMS systems? Any recommendations? I'm looking to do basic up/down monitoring and a tftp server for IOS and router/switch configurations.

      I haven't played with any, but it looks like Bigsister and Nagios are the primary choices. I also looked a little at OpenNMS and NMIS (http://www.sins.com.au/nmis/) from the Cisco-Centric Open Source project.

 What I'm looking for:
Basic up/down monitoring
Ability to monitor different interfaces on a router (serial 0, serial 1, eth 0, ...)
Ease of installation
Ease of use
Integration with tftp server
Ability to run on a low-end PC (I'll only be monitoring 5 routers and a switch, and even then - only to figure out up/down and maybe route convergence times from various routing protocols)

Nice to have would be SNMP tools.

      As a side, I might be interested in ssh to the server, so friends could connect to the server via ssh, then telnet to the lab routers from there. The routers are on 11.x and 12.x IOS, and the older stuff does not support ssh (or at least I haven't gotten that far in the manuals).