[ILUG] tip of the day

[John P. Looney]

 If you are looking after machines, check out nagios. It's quite good - it
does all sorts of monitoring, so you don't have to. You can set it up to
monitor all your servers, and email you when things go bad - like the
exchange server stops responding to IMAP queries..

 More importantly, most of the plugins have "warning thresholds"; for
instance, I monitor all my machines to make sure that they have at least
20% free on all disk partitions. It's nice to get an email saying the
webserver is 85% full, because someone left a PHP page echoing a few dozen
kilobytes to disk every time it's hit....before the website falls over.

 However, it uses snmp to do much of it's work, and on my little raq3 that
does this monitoring, the load is quite high, as snmpget is a very
expensive program to start off (something like .45 of a second), as it has
to read through around a meg of structured text MIB files, every time it
starts.

 However, Mr Brady pointed me in the direction of;
    http://freshmeat.net/releases/107146/

 which is an snmp proxy for nagios. I changed my polling time from eight
minutes to three, and the load went from three to 0.0 - for the first time
in months!

John