Subject: [ILUG] tip of the day
From: "John P. Looney" <[email-masked]>
To: Irish LUG list <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Dec 2002 16:54:36 +0000

If you are looking after machines, check out nagios. It's quite good - it
does all sorts of monitoring, so you don't have to. You can set it up to
monitor all your servers, and email you when things go bad - like the
exchange server stops responding to IMAP queries..

 More importantly, most of the plugins have "warning thresholds"; for
instance, I monitor all my machines to make sure that they have at least
20% free on all disk partitions. It's nice to get an email saying the
webserver is 85% full, because someone left a PHP page echoing a few dozen
kilobytes to disk every time it's hit....before the website falls over.

 However, it uses snmp to do much of it's work, and on my little raq3 that
does this monitoring, the load is quite high, as snmpget is a very
expensive program to start off (something like .45 of a second), as it has
to read through around a meg of structured text MIB files, every time it
starts.

 However, Mr Brady pointed me in the direction of;
    http://freshmeat.net/releases/107146/

 which is an snmp proxy for nagios. I changed my polling time from eight
minutes to three, and the load went from three to 0.0 - for the first time
in months!

John

From: "AJ McKee" <[email-masked]>
To: "'Irish LUG list'" <[email-masked]>
Subject: RE: [ILUG] tip of the day
Date: Fri, 20 Dec 2002 17:02:43 -0000

The cool thing about Nagios is the versatility. With sms_client you can
have it sms you alerts, send you email or run just about any command you
want. We also have it capable of receiving an sms and showing the status
to a customer. It's a rockin' app. 

One easy thing though which has eluded me a little as I ain't a perl
head is I am trying to get a perl script fetch a web page and find a
particular phrase that is on that web page. If its not found then send
an alert to nagios, if it is found then do nothing. Currently I have it
working in php, but now perl. Any ideas?

Nagios rocks.

Aj