[GLLUG] gnip (server monitoring program)

[Hampton, Rodney]

Marshall,

Since I do a fair bit of enterprise level monitoring allow me to add a few
comments.
1) Create a user account on the remote machine (say WebMon for example)
2) Your monitoring machine can ping the remote machine, but it can also
telnet or ssh to the remote machine (it isn't hard to create an expect
script that does this)
3) You know if the telnet or ssh login is successful that the remote machine
is up since it had to at least create a shell account and therefore is not
just a dead machine responding to pings because the networking stack is
still OK.  
4) It is much easier to add functionality like having the monitoring machine
log into the remote machine being monitored and fire off a script or run
something like vmstat, ps, lsof, etc.  
5) Updates to the monitoring machine can be accomplished from a central
location.  Under your paradigm you would need to push out updates to your
program to ALL of the remote machines.  

Just my 0.02

Rodney Hampton

-----Original Message-----
From: Ben Pfaff [mailto:blp at cs.stanford.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, October 14, 2003 3:47 PM
To: GLLUG
Subject: Re: [GLLUG] gnip (server monitoring program)


Marshal Newrock <marshal at simons-rock.edu> writes:

> In my spare time (of which I've had plenty) recently, I've been working on
> an idea I've had.  At my previous job, we had a program which detected
> machines down by pinging them.  On a few separate occasions, it failed to
> detect a machine down because, while the machine was crashed with a bad
> hard drive or kernel panic, it was still responding to pings.

As an aside, it seems to be little-known that a halted Linux
kernel still has a functioning network stack.  It will still
route packets (if configured to do so), and, yes, respond to
pings.

Your procedure sounds like a clever solution.
-- 
"Note that nobody reads every post in linux-kernel.   In fact, nobody who
 expects to have time left over to  actually do any real kernel work will
 read even half.  Except Alan Cox, but he's actually not human, but about
 a thousand gnomes working in under-ground caves in Swansea." --Linus
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