March 2011 - Xymon - Xymon mailman web

Comment on Flapping
by betsy.schwartz＠gmail.com 31 Mar '11

31 Mar '11

First, let me say that this is very nifty. Flap detection makes folks look at things that they might have missed. It's driving the NOC folks **nuts** though. Acking the reds should stop them from paging, but the main page then stays red for a full half hour, even though the problem is completely fixed. IMHO it would be very useful to have a "release" or "ALL CLEAR" button of some sort for flapping situations that have been dealt with. The NOC folks hate red screens... (it would be even MORE useful to have a release button that only some folks could push...is there any seekrit workaround?) In our case we have a bit of a cascade situation, where one server can trigger a lot of secondary reds, so we end up looking at a whole lot of red... thanks Betsy

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Monitoring Nginx
by tseglard＠wat.tv 31 Mar '11

31 Mar '11

Hello, Do some of you use Xymon to monitor Nginx ? Basically, you could use the stub-status module (http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpStubStatusModule) to enable the status handler within Nginx. The output is similar to : Active connections: 291 server accepts handled requests 16630948 16630948 31070465 Reading: 6 Writing: 179 Waiting: 106 It shouldn't be difficult to write some scripts to achieve this task but I ask, just in case... Sincerly, Thomas S

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xymon and couchdb
by olivier＠audry.fr 31 Mar '11

31 Mar '11

hello Phil you say that the two cluster node can't talk together ? In this case yes your setup is complex :). For your information drbd is not shared storage. It's network block replication. For exemple we gto 12k devices and 20mbps network traffic for drbd replication. When we switch we got exactly the same information on the second node. So we can ack, maintenance etc. this is very efficient. oau ----- Mail original ----- De: "Phil Wild" <phil at holobyte.com.au> À: "Olivier AUDRY" <olivier at audry.fr> Envoyé: Jeudi 31 Mars 2011 10:14:59 Objet: Re: [Xymon] xymon and couchdb Thanks, I can't provide a heartbeat interface between the two xymon servers and there is no shared storage available, now can I fail an IP address over between the nodes. We have a 5 minute life on the DNS CNAME for the xymon server and fail over from one site to the other by switching the CNAME. Configuration files are synchronised from live to standby host using rsync. Both xymon servers pick up faults and both try to send out messages. All alerts go out through a SCRIPT (both sms and email) and the script drops the alert if the server is the standby. The servers know if they are active or standby by checking the content of a text file prior to delivering the message. If the text file contains the word active, messages are delivered, if the word standby is detected, the messages are dropped. Acking an alert becomes a little more complex. Cheers Phil On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 3:20 PM, Olivier AUDRY < olivier at audry.fr > wrote: hello Phil for a good auto failover we use heartbeat and drbd. Right now is working very well and the implementation is very simple et efficient. 5s to switch. oau ----- Mail original ----- De: "Phil Wild" < phil at holobyte.com.au > À: xymon at xymon.com Envoyé: Jeudi 31 Mars 2011 08:54:52 Objet: [Xymon] xymon and couchdb Hi Xymon users, I have a question and was wondering what people thought. We currently run two xymon servers to provide HA (servers are in different data centres with only IP connectivity between them). All clients update both servers and we replicate the state file at regular intervals to help with failover (manual) in the event of an issue with the servers. We were looking at automating the failover process and the subject of Apache CouchDB was raised. Reading through some documentation on couchdb, I thought that perhaps couchdb would make a good backend repository for xymon state information. I was wondering if anyone has any experience with couchdb from a performance perspective? It would be a big change to xymon to use couchdb as the repository for xymon state but it may aid in allowing for a more distributed/clustered xymon deployment. Thoughts? Phil _______________________________________________ Xymon mailing list Xymon at xymon.com http://lists.xymon.com/mailman/listinfo/xymon

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force ssl3 check
by ragonlan＠gmail.com 31 Mar '11

31 Mar '11

Anybody knows how to force ssl v3 in pop3s or smtps? A have some services that only allow ssl3 connections but xymon do ssl2 check by default and cheeks fails. I got this working setting this line: contest.h -> #define SSLVERSION_DEFAULT 0 into this one: contest.h -> #define SSLVERSION_DEFAULT 2 and recompile but I don't know if there is a easier way to do it. Cheers, Raul

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xymon and couchdb
by phil＠holobyte.com.au 31 Mar '11

31 Mar '11

Hi Xymon users, I have a question and was wondering what people thought. We currently run two xymon servers to provide HA (servers are in different data centres with only IP connectivity between them). All clients update both servers and we replicate the state file at regular intervals to help with failover (manual) in the event of an issue with the servers. We were looking at automating the failover process and the subject of Apache CouchDB was raised. Reading through some documentation on couchdb, I thought that perhaps couchdb would make a good backend repository for xymon state information. I was wondering if anyone has any experience with couchdb from a performance perspective? It would be a big change to xymon to use couchdb as the repository for xymon state but it may aid in allowing for a more distributed/clustered xymon deployment. Thoughts? Phil

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windows powershell client
by tomg＠mcclatchyinteractive.com 31 Mar '11

31 Mar '11

What's the status of the powershell windows client? I have a few windows servers that need to be monitored and thought I'd try the power shell client instead of BBWin, if the shell client is ready. Tom

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"xymond" column is blank/dash
by jlaidman＠rebel-it.com.au 31 Mar '11

31 Mar '11

Hi I can't work this out. I have two practically identical Xymon (4.3.0) servers successfully monitoring a few other servers. Both have identical hosts.cfg files and present identical results for all monitored hosts, as well as themselves. The strange thing is that the "xymond" column for the first server is green but is a dash "-" for the second server. It looks the same on both servers. I can't see anything in the logs to indicate a problem. The only configuration difference between the two servers is the setting of XYMONSERVERHOSTNAME and XYMONSERVERIP in xymonserver.cfg. Can anyone suggest why the difference, or where to look for problems? Cheers Jeremy

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Hobbit Permission Problem
by Phil.Crooker＠orix.com.au 31 Mar '11

31 Mar '11

> So, to be clear, you su as the user hobbit and change to that directory and cannot read the file? Sorry didn't read the original email..... Just ignore that question. Is it just *this* user or *this* directory? Have you tried creating another user in the adm group or create another (unrelated) directory with the same rights? This is odd. cheers, Phil. >>> On 3/29/2011 at 3:49 PM, in message <4D916BD1.2070709 at websitemanagers.com.au>, Adam Goryachev <adam at websitemanagers.com.au> wrote: > On 29/03/2011 4:15 PM, Josh Luthman wrote: >> So (user) hobbit is in group adm >> >> ll shows the file is owned by group adm >> >> (user) hobbit can not read the file? > > Yep, that's the problem.... (or at least, it has me befuddled).... > > Thanks, > Adam > _______________________________________________ > Xymon mailing list > Xymon at xymon.com > http://lists.xymon.com/mailman/listinfo/xymon

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HTTP response test?
by mmoldvan＠csc.com 30 Mar '11

30 Mar '11

I would think you could easily do this by using "time wget <yoururl>" and setting it up as a cron job to report the time taken back to your Xymon server ... setting up the graph would be a little more difficult, but is possible using NCV or other options through your Xymon server. Good luck, Matt. Unix System Administrator Computer Science Corporation This is a PRIVATE message. If you are not the intended recipient, please delete without copying and kindly advise us by e-mail of the mistake in delivery. NOTE: Regardless of content, this e-mail shall not operate to bind CSC to any order or other contract unless pursuant to explicit written agreement or government initiative expressly permitting the use of e-mail for such purpose. From: James Isolder <isolderj at hotmail.com> To: <xymon at xymon.com> Date: 03/29/2011 09:50 AM Subject: Re: [Xymon] HTTP response test? i was acutally thinking about this and i think the best way to achieve it to have a file of a certain size sitting on the webserver and then retrieving it and timing how long that takes. I was after how long a page takes to load in a web browser. Thanks anyway for the help J > From: bgmilne at staff.telkomsa.net > To: xymon at xymon.com > Subject: Re: [Xymon] HTTP response test? > Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2011 15:01:58 +0200 > CC: isolderj at hotmail.com > > On Tuesday, 29 March 2011 14:27:46 James Isolder wrote: > > I wonder if anyone hase any advice about a test to check how long a site > > takes to load and then graphing how long it takes to load per five minute > > interval. > > Besides just adding an http test to the host with the complete URL you want to > test (which does this)? > > If this isn't the answer you want (e.g., do you want to alert at a threshold > lower than the default?), you need to provide more detail in your question. > > Regards, > Buchan This is an e-mail from General Dynamics Land Systems. It is for the intended recipient only and may contain confidential and privileged information. No one else may read, print, store, copy, forward or act in reliance on it or its attachments. If you are not the intended recipient, please return this message to the sender and delete the message and any attachments from your computer. Your cooperation is appreciated. _______________________________________________ Xymon mailing list Xymon at xymon.com http://lists.xymon.com/mailman/listinfo/xymon

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Hierarchial alerting
by Phil.Crooker＠orix.com.au 30 Mar '11

30 Mar '11

Hi All, I'm just in the process of converting our old big brother monitor to xymon. I had a look at zabbix, nagios, groundworks, and pandorafms and found too many quirks, cruft and gotchas (plus the problem of open core systems). I returned to the bb clones and found xymon is not only active and maintained. I must say Xymon is a well thought out, well executed step beyond big brother, well done, Henrik. Is there a way to have a hierarchy for alerts? For example, say we have a branch office with a print server, file server, router, switch, etc. I have a xymon entry for each (and multiples for each, ie poll the ftp port on the file server as well as just the conn monitoring). If the WAN link to the site dies, I get alerts for all the above, where as I should really just get one alert for the router. Or if the file server dies, I shouldn't get both ftp and file server alerts, just the server. I know this wasn't available for big brother and can't find anything in xymon. Does this exsit and/or has this been considered? For our big brother system, I created a perl script daemon that reads in the allevents log to create a "stateful" table of all monitored items. I also have a text file table of the relationships between the monitored items, using tabs: core_switch wan_router site_router site_switch printer server ftp bbd_host local_server smtp user_subnet_switch printer This table is read into a hashed array, the allevents log file is tailed to keep the state table current and the script awaits queries. When an alertable event comes in, this daemon is queried by the alert subsystem (using another perl script), the daemon checks to see if any parent items are in a red state, if so the alert is discarded. This is effectively just a plugin and could be more efficiently done if integrated into the bbd. In terms of config files, having to maintain two files is not ideal. Currently the host listing and web layout are effectively combined in one file, so adding a hierarchy as above would be tricky. Perhaps a second "#" with the parent following, ie: 1.2.3.4 hostname.domain.com # smtp dns # core_switch.domain.com Anyway, this is just an initial query about this issue. thanks and regards, Phil

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