[hobbit] checking websites and DNS registration with xymon

In <261E4C2F69FE064286B5E84262CE5F9258A40E at leisure-mail.Leisure.com> "David Hay Currie" <dhaycurrie at leisurefitness.com> writes:

I am trying to monitor websites that we have. Most of DNS domains points to the same web site.

1.   How can I check the status of the domain registration? There is

   a dnsreg in the xymon demo pages, but I did not find any information regarding this feature or how to set it up

The 'dnsreg' status is a quickly hacked together script that uses data from "whois" to determine when the domain expires. Not pretty, and not particularly portable - it just works for those top-level domains I have registered.

You can see the script now at http://www.hswn.dk/hobbit-cgi/viewconf.sh?dnsreg

2.   How can I monitor the IP address that a domain has. In the demo

   pages there is a check for IP, which probably would do what I want

It is pretty straight-forward to write a script that checks the output from a "host www.mydomain.com" against a static IP...

3.   Currently I am just checkin by using "0.0.0.0

   www.domainname.com # noconn http://www.domainname.com" which works, but once an hour a couple of checks go red at the same time, and this is most likely due to slow response from the server. Basically I want to avoid DoSing the web server with my tests. Suggestions?

I seriously doubt that your server would be DoS'ed by the single request every 5 minutes that Xymon generates - if it does, then you have a whole different problem!

You can increase the timeout (--timeout=N option to bbtest-net), or you can add a "badhttp:1:2:3" option to those entries in bb-hosts, then they won't go red until after 3 failed tests (see the "badTEST" description in the bb-hosts(5) man-page).

Regards, Henrik

-- Henrik Storner