[BBLISA] simpler alternative to Nagios

[Bill Bogstad]

On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 6:27 PM, Robert Keyes <bob at sinister.com> 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.

Actually, I would say that ping tests precisely that the "host" is
accessible.  It doesn't, however, test that any particular network
service running on that host is alive.   I wouldn't use "wget" to test
if mysql is running.  I might, however, use it to test if a web server
is up.   BTW, ping failing doesn't mean that the "host" is down.   It
could be network or local problems on the testing machine.
When manually diagnosing a problem, most sysadmins implicitly know
these things.  However,  when we go to automate system testing, we
often shortcut the decision tree to the "common" failure modes.  Or at
least the ones that we find easier to automate...

Bill Bogstad