[BBLISA] simpler alternative to Nagios

[Brian O'Neill]

I haven't experienced this, but there are many reasons why a linux box 
(or solaris, etc.) can respond to a ping but nothing else is working - 
out of process slots, file descriptors, etc.

ping only means your network connectivity between here and there works, 
and the box is at least powered on and the network stack is functioning.


On 9/1/2010 12:15 PM, Dean Anderson wrote:
> I haven't checked recently if this is still the case.  Years ago linux
> changed the interrupt handler to respond to ping.  This greatly improved
> ping response by cheating, but had some other side effects.  The kernel
> can crash, and if the crash didn't interfere with the interrupt table,
> it will still ping while dead.
>
> 		--Dean
>
> 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.
>>
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>>
>