spong-network
spong-network - report network service information to spong server.
spong-network [--debug n] [--kill|--restart|--nosleep|--refresh]
[config_file
]
This checks network connectivity and network service availability to various
machines you want to monitor. It reports the status of the network services
that it monitors to the spong server. Everything happens again after sleeping
for a time period you have defined in your configuration file. This program
typically runs on your spong server machine (although it can be run on any host
- although I would suggest one with good network connectivity).
The program checks a series of network services that are configured separately
for each host. spong-network also can be very aggressive in checking for
network service that are down. You can configure multiple rechecks to guard
against transitional failures.
You should start this program in your system startup file, and it should be
running constantly. If no parameters are specified, spong-network forks
and detaches itself to run as a daemon.
If you provide the --debug n flag, then debugging information will be
printed to stdout, otherwise output will only be produced if there is a
problem. Where n is a number from 1 - 9. A higher number means more
verbosity in the debugging output.
If you provide the --restart flag, a signal will be sent to the spong-network
process that is currently running that will cause it to reload it's
configuration files. If you provide the --kill flag, a signal will be sent
to the running spong-client process causing it to exit.
The --nosleep or --refresh flag causes the program to cycle through all
of the checks once then exit. These flags can be used to run spong-client as a
cron job (depreciated), but it recommended that you run the program
continuously.
It sends a message for each check to the spong server and reports the
following:
The color is determined by comparing the current status of that
service against thresholds defined in the configuration file. If
they are greater then the level you have defined for a warning, then the color
is yellow. If they are greater then the critical level you have defined then
the color is red.
The one line summary provides information that might be useful at a glance when
looking at the overall system status (such as a brief report on the load,
number of users, and uptime).
The more detailed message contains information such as the output of
the ping command from the check ping module or the data read after testing
a network service.
The check are actually a setup of modules that are called in series by
spong-network. Upon initialization, spong-network will load the all of
the modules that will be used from the LIBDIR/Spong/Network/plugins
directory. As each module is initialized, it registers itself with the plugins
registry (see the Developer Guide).
The list of network checks and the order the are performed that are performed
for a host are defined in the services attribute of the host's entry in the
%HOST variable. The ping service is appended by
default to all of the lists of services to be check for a host. If the
meta-service name of noping is defined for a host, the ping check will no be
done for the host.
- spong.conf
- By default this reads the spong.conf file on startup. You can
specify an alternate config file via a command line option and it will read
that file instead. If you change values in the configuration file you will need
to restart this program for those changes to be re-read.
- spong.conf.[hostname]
- After reading the configuration file that you specify (or the default),
it then reads the
spong.conf.[hostname]
file where [hostname] is the
hostname of the machine that you are running on. Since these configuration
files are just standard perl code that gets imported, the variables that you
define in the host specific config file will take precedence over the standard
configuration settings.
- spong.hosts
- spong-network reads all of the host that are to be check from the
%HOSTS variable in the the spong.hosts manpage file. The
list of services to be check for each host is already read from
spong.hosts
.
From spong.conf
:
- $SPONGSLEEP, $SPONGSERVER, $SPONG_UPDATE_PORT
- Some basic spong configuration options that define how long to sleep (in
seconds) before checking the status of a service again, the hostname of the
spong server, and the port number that the spong server listens
- $SPONGSLEEP{'DEFAULT'}, $SPONGSLEEP{'spong-network'}
- This the new method for specifying the $SPONGSLEEP interval for Spong programs.
If there is not $SPONGSLEEP{} entry for the program, it will use the
$SPONGSLEEP{'DEFAULT'} value. If no value is then found, spong-client
fall back to using $SPONGSLEEP.
- $SPONGTMP
- The directory that Spong programs use for temporary store and work files. It
should be different a directory than
/tmp
for operation and security reasons.
- $SPONG_LOG_FILE
- If set to 1, spong-network will log errors to a log file in $SPONGTMP
named
spong-network.log
.
- $SPONG_LOG_SYSLOG
- If set to 1, spong-network will log errors to the syslog using the
USER facility and the ERR priority.
From spong.hosts
:
- %HOSTS
- All of the host names defined in %HOSTS are the list of hosts that
spong-network will check. The services defined in the services attribute
are the list of services that will be check for each host. The ping service
is prepended to the list of services unless 'noping' is defined.
spong.conf
, spong.conf.hostname
, spong.hosts
Perl v5.005_03 or greater is required.
The check_dns module uses the Net::DNS Perl module. On some systems the
Net::DNS module will fail and start reporting false DNS lookup failures. The
cause is unknown at present. This will cause dns check for all hosts to fail
and be reported as a critical status. The fix is to restart spong-network
(i.e. spong-network --restart ),
A work-around is to regularly do restart spong-network, such as from a
cron job.
the spong-server manpage, the spong.conf manpage, the spong.hosts manpage,
the developer-guide manpage
Ed Hill <ed-hill@uiowa.edu
>, Unix System Administrator, The University of
Iowa
Stephen L Johnson <sjohnson@monsters.org
>
Based on code/ideas from Sean MacGuire (BB), and Helen Harrison (Pong). Ed Hill
original converted Big Brother (http://www.bb4.com) into Perl which diverged
from Big Brother to become Spong. Ed Hill continued Spong development until
version 2.1. Stephen L Johnson took over development in October, 1999 with his
changes which became Spong 2.5.
[Top]
Generated by Pod::HTML 0.41 on Tue Nov 21 12:31:32 2000