Hi all, I am aware of the smtp.monitor but am still unsure/unconvinced that this is enough to detect if my mon monitors have lost the capability to deliver email to the administrators.
I have two monitors in separate locations/cities. One monitor is located at a remote hosting center and monitors the applications and network on that datacenter and also monitors the other monitor. The other monitor is at a different location and primarily monitors the monitor at the datacenter. I want to monitor that each of these monitors has email capability. My first inclination is to run the sendmail daemon on each mon machine and configure the smtp.monitor on each mon to check the smtp server on the other mon machine. I'm still relatively ignorant regarding email but it seems like there are still a lot of things that can go wrong which can prevent mail.alerts from reaching their destination but which are not detected by this simple mutual smtp.monitor approach. Perhaps a daily status email to the admins would prevent a problem from going unnoticed for more than a day. I have one idea for an improvement. As with some of the application monitoring, I prefer to actually make the application "do the thing" it does. In the case of email that could be to make each monitor send an email to the other monitor and have each monitor check for those emails. For example, send an email every 5 minutes and every 10 minutes make sure you received an email (and empty the mailbox) else alert that email capability is suspect. I can see that this still is not foolproof, since emails need to go to other locations to inform the admins. I saw in searching through the posts regarding mail that there exists an smtp loopback monitor. It looks like this would have most of the code needed to do the above. Perhaps it does everything I want, as is, by configuring it to loop through the smtp servers that would service the administrators. Anyway, after all this rambling, the bottom line question is: What is "best practice" out there and what do most admins find sufficient (along with any holes in each approach)? Many thanks for any insights (or concrete examples). Michael Vogt __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ mon mailing list mon@linux.kernel.org http://linux.kernel.org/mailman/listinfo/mon
