June 2012 - Xymon - Xymon mailman web

Xymon and BBWin: issue with special german characters in MS Windows service names
by christian.becker＠rhein-zeitung.net 26 Jun '12

26 Jun '12

Hello all, I have a Xymon server running Xymon 4.3.7 on RHEL 6.1. This setup is working fine. Then I have a couple of Windows servers running BBWin 01.2 in local mode with update feature enabled. This is also running fine. During the deeper configuration phase I recognized that I have an issue with the special german characters. I found this when I wanted to include services from one of our MS Exchange servers: we have servers running a german MS Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise SP1, together with a german MS Exchange 2010. One of the services is the "MSExchangeMailSubmission", but this is "just" the service name. I think in Xymon (or better: in BBWin) one has to include the display name of the service one wants to monitor (?). The thing is, that the display name of this specific service is "Microsoft Exchange-Mailübergabe". That's it. The special german character "ü" screws up the setup in that way, that this particular service won't get displayed in my setup. That's not only a problem with our Exchange servers, but for my understanding it is a problem in the "playing together" between the Xymon and the BBWin setup, or better: it is a problem with the german MS Windows setup. To troubleshoot this thing I changed the locale of my Xymon server from "en_US.utf8" to "LANG=de_DE.UTF-8", and after that to "LANG=de_DE.iso885915 at euro", but without any success. I could monitor these specific services as processes, but this is not what I want. Do I need to change something else in my setup. i.e. in my webserver? Any help would be appreciated... Christian CHRISTIAN BECKER System Engineer CSC August-Horch-Strasse 28, 56070 Koblenz, Germany Global Outsourcing Services Central Region | cbecker4 at csc.com | www.csc.com ________________________________ CSC * 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 * CSC Deutschland Services GmbH * Registered Office: Abraham-Lincoln-Park 1, 65189 Wiesbaden, Germany * Board of Directors: Gerhard Fercho (Chairman),Thomas Nebe, Peter Schmidt * Registered in Germany: HRB 7574, Wiesbaden

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Hand editing config files
by henrik＠hswn.dk 25 Jun '12

25 Jun '12

Hi, in another mail thread, another monitoring tool (Zenoss) was mentioned which had the advantage of “no hand editing of config files”. Text based config files have their ups and downs - they are infinitely flexible and can adapt to all sorts of weird ways of defining your setup, but it is also easier to "get it wrong" and put something in there which doesn't work. Even happens to me occasionally. It's the age-old debate over whether something is "powerful" or "dangerous". I am currently working on the next Xymon version (except I've been swamped with for-pay work the past couple of months ... and a hefty round of lay-offs in other departments than mine). This involves a complete rewrite of the network testing tool, and for this rewrite I've started using an SQLite database for storing some intermediate data used by the network tester, instead of keeping it in a bunch of temporary text-files. And it has made me consider the idea of using a database for storing at least some of the configuration - first of all the hosts.cfg configuration of hosts, IP-adresses and network tests. This would make some things simpler, others a bit more complex - "xymongrep", for instance - but would also make it a lot easier to provide a GUI for managing what hosts are being monitored. This is not going to happen anytime soon, but since the subject was up in the air - what do you think about it ? Is it a major problem that Xymon has all configuration in text files ? How many of you auto-generate the Xymon config by extracting the information from a database already ? Just looking for some feedback... Regards, Henrik

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End of line missing after alert history
by Michael.Beatty＠sherwin.com 25 Jun '12

25 Jun '12

Last week I was playing around with some server configurations, honestly, I don't remember every file I touched. Nothing seemed to be broken at the time. Today, however, I noticed that while all current status are fine, if I click on event history and click on a change of condition alert, the alert status is missing and end of line character and the following text "status unchanged in" is crammed into the alert string. If I go back through the history of alerts, this isn't happening prior to me being in there and changing things, it started showing up after words. And just to state again, my regular real-time status pages are fine, it is only when I go into event history that I can see the problem I don't know if my text formatting will transfer to the mailing list, but the alert looks like below. (first line is large font and white. Second line is small font and blue) Alert receivedSatus unchanged in 1 day Status message received from 127.0.0.1 -- Michael Beatty Sherwin-Williams IT Analyst/Developer michael.beatty at sherwin.com 216-515-7374

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integration of foreign graphs
by martin.flemming＠desy.de 22 Jun '12

22 Jun '12

Hi ! Is there any "easy" method to integrate foreign graphs into xymon or rather into of an existing page of a host ? The background is, i've got an script from my colleagues, which gathers data from ibm-Scale-Out-network-storage (SONAS), generats rrd's and corresponding png's which i want integrated in one page of xymon ..... Any hint is welcome ... thanks & cheers Martin

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Cleaning up graphs on trends page
by Michael.Beatty＠sherwin.com 22 Jun '12

22 Jun '12

I've been playing around with my graphs on the trends page by tweaking the analysis.cfg file. It seems now, that I have lines stuck on my graphs that no longer exist. I'm also seeing that I have 3 different "Network Ports" graphs. How do I clean these up so only real graphs are displaying? -- Michael Beatty Sherwin-Williams IT Analyst/Developer michael.beatty at sherwin.com 216-515-7374

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Monitoring a simple cluster
by rrdansmith＠gmail.com 22 Jun '12

22 Jun '12

Red Hat 5.8 server, 5.5 clients. Xymon 4.3.7 clients and server. I am trying to put together a quick cluster monitor using depend and combos, but I think I'm stuck. Has anyone else done this? I have two servers: smtp01 and smtp02 that are in an active/passive cluster. The smtpd process only runs on the server that is active, but there are other processes that need to be monitored on both hosts (e.g. clurgmgrd). I would like to go red and have an alert if one of the required processes goes down on either server, but I only want an alert if the active node of the cluster has a problem with the smtpd process. My initial idea was to have procs go red for clurgmgrd and yellow on smtpd, use NOPROPYELLOW, and then use a combo so I could see what host was active. hosts.cfg: 1.2.3.4 smtp01 # NOPROPYELLOW:procs 1.2.3.5 smtp02 # NOPROPYELLOW:procs 1.2.3.6 smtpHA # smtp analysis.cfg: HOST=smtp01 PROC clurgmgrd PROC smtpd HOST=smtp02 PROC clurgmgrd PROC smtpd combo.cfg: smtpHA.procs = (smtp01.conn && smtp01.procs) || (smtp02.conn && smtp02.procs) Unfortunately a yellow status is equal to a 1 for the combo, so even if both sides of the cluster were down, the combo would still show as up (green&&yellow is 1&&1). Then I thought I could cover the scenario by making a "depends" test, but depends seems to be focused on disabling tests if another status is red.which doesn't work either since I don't want the page to go red. This isn't a huge issue because the smtp poll on smtpHA will trigger red if both nodes are down, but it seems like there should be an easy way to do this. Am I making it more complicated than it needs to be, or am I better writing a custom monitor? Thanks! -dan

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dnsbl
by indymichaelb＠gmail.com 22 Jun '12

22 Jun '12

Anyone have a custom test to monitor if you appear on mail blacklists, reputation lists, or the like? If so, willing to share?

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smtp alert problem/bug
by F.Reenders＠utwente.nl 22 Jun '12

22 Jun '12

Hello, When I get an alert for the smtp test I get the WARNING message as a normal e-mail (text). The RECOVERD e-mail always is an attachment file with the .bin extention. On this list people suggested it was a mail server problem. MS Exchange did have this behavior in the past. Now I looked a bit closer to the mailx command xymon uses to send it. This is in the mailx man page: Mailx expects input text to be in Unix format, with lines sepa‐ rated by newline (^J, \n) characters only. Non-Unix text files that use carriage return (^M, \r) characters in addition will be treated as binary data; to send such files as text, strip these characters e. g. by tr -d '\015' <input | mailx . . . or fix the tools that generate them. It seem that the RECOVERD message coming from xymon contains a “\r” character. I think the output/e-mails in xymon should replace the “\r” with “\n” characters. Regards, Frederik Reenders, Systeembeheerder ICT-Servicecentrum Universiteit Twente, Postbus 217, 7500 AE Enschede Telefoon 053 489 6723 f.reenders at utwente.nl<mailto:l.m.visscher at utwente.nl>, http://www.utwente.nl/icts/

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Changing the HTML Title
by malcolm.hunter＠gmx.com 22 Jun '12

22 Jun '12

----- Original Message ----- From: Michael Beatty Sent: 06/21/12 08:51 PM To: xymon at xymon.com Subject: [Xymon] Changing the HTML Title What is the correct way to change the HTML Title of Xymon? This would be the description in the <title> tag that displays in the title bar of your browser. Is there a parm for this? You need to change the _header files in ~xymon/server/web. Malcolm -- BBWin Development - The Windows client for Big Brother and Xymon http://bbwin.sourceforge.net http://xymon.sourceforge.net

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Hand editing config files
by losburn＠thepinnaclegroup.com 21 Jun '12

21 Jun '12

Please add another vote for "don't force a change into what's working so well". Bruce White's incisive analysis (deleted for brevity) includes what seems to me to be the most salient point: "adding a DB back end might reduce the flexibility to port Xymon to the next O/S or platform" Thanks for bothering to ask the users, and carry on with the good work.

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