[BBLISA] simpler alternative to Nagios

[Daniel Feenberg]

On Fri, 27 Aug 2010, Robert Keyes wrote:

>
>
> On Fri, 27 Aug 2010, David N. Blank-Edelman wrote:
>
>> Hi Alex-
>>  Big Brother's successor, Xymon (formerly Hobbit) at http://sourceforge.net/projects/xymon/ may get you closer to what you seek.
>
> I am going to jump on the bandwagon here and yell 'Xymon!'
>
> Looking at your earlier idea about checking with ping, I cringed for a
> second, but then recovered. But it might be worth mentioning here that
> ping is NOT sufficient to see if a host is alive! I have known of an
> organization which used ping to see if its servers were alive, but ping
> didn't detect when a DoS attack ran the servers out of filehandles causing
> all net services to become unavailable, including SSH, without affecting
> the ICMP stack.

There are multiple degrees of checking a mail server:

0) responds to ping
1) provides the sendmail banner on the SMTP port
2) accepts a message
3) delivers a message (or)
4) delivers a message but discards spam or virus

Most other services have similar levels.

Dan Feenberg

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