Re: Remote host up/down monitoring tool?

In article <f3go2d$k4g$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Tony Mountifield <tony@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I have a small number of boxes in different locations, and currently have
a fairly crude cron job running on each, which does a ping of one or more
of the other boxes, and if the ping fails, it emails me to say the other
box might be down. It then emails me again the next time the other box
appears to be up.

Of course, this can't distinguish between the remote box really being down
and there being a network problem somewhere between the local and remote
boxes.

I've been mulling over the idea of a more sophisticated scheme, where
a number of boxes send each other messages, indicating not only their
presence, but which other boxes they believe to be up. Then if a box
goes down, the other boxes all see it has gone and agree that it really
is down. However, if there is instead a network outage or routing flap
so that a box is reachable from some places but not all, it might be
possible to distinguish this case.

So my question is: does anyone know of an existing too that does this
sort of thing?

Nagios. http://www.nagios.org/

It's been about for a while, and there might well be something newer or
better, but as I've been using it for a while, I stick to it... I get
notifications by email or SMS for the really important ones.

It *is* a bit of a PITA to get running initially, but it does have the
ability to monitor "services" as sell as general connectifity (eg. it
can monitor web, email/pop/imap, dns, mysql, etc.) and you can tell it
about your local network heirarchy/topology, so one thing that depends
on another shouldn't trigger the alarm if it's "hidden" by a failure
closer to home as it were...

Gordon
.

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