Re: {bb} deadcat suggestions

[Philip Clark <bblist@cannae.uklinux.net>]

On Fri, 2006-09-08 at 16:53, steve sayler wrote:
> Hi all,... happy Friday!
>
> I'm in the process of making my BB more functional, such as going
> beyond the standard bbserver & bbclient services, and I was hoping
> to get some recommendations from experienced Big Brothers & Sisters.
>
> My environment is: 
>
>   o Win NT, various servers, XP: (SQL, AD, SMS, DHCP,... and other
>     Win/domain services), 
>   o Redhat  RHEL4: (mysql, subversion, lmgrd, dns, ssh, ftp, ldap,
>     apache, tomcat, squid, legato, and a ton of other services),
>   o HPUX 11.0: (apache, nfs, ftp, rsyncd, )
>   o QNX 4.2??   ( ftp, custom services, data ingest),
>   o Ultrix 4.4: (ftp, telnet, custom db, custom services, data
>     ingest),
>
> So what are your favorite (and  possibly hints at what to avoid might
> also be nice) deadcat scripts??

I don't have any specific recommendations but, without knowing a
great deal more about your situation, I doubt that they would be
of much help to you anyway. What I do have is one tip and one
warning.

Often, the most successful approach is to do a high-level functional
audit of your organisation. Identify the areas and operations that
are most important and sensitive and relate those to particular
hosts and services. Once you have the standard network and client
tests configured to cover as much of that as possible (and other
less critical machines in potentially coarser detail), you can
proceed to the next item on list and work out the most appropriate
way to monitor that.

Working in this way, sequentially down a priority list, has some
distinct advantages. It simplifies matters and avoids mistakes,
it makes tracing problems much easier and it also generates a
number of distinct opportunities to impress the bosses :)

Now the warning. Don't be tempted into monitoring things just
for the sake of it. Test only those things that might otherwise
fail (or misbehave) silently and would result in a problem for
your users or customers. For example, a group of Unix workstations
might use NFS mounts for access to shared data but run ftp server
processes to allow direct data transfer between machines. It is
likely that users would not know or care about that and only
administrators would use it. It might actually be worse than
useless to test this. If ftpd is being run from inetd (as is
often the case for such processes), testing might cause it to
be constantly reloaded unnecessarily.

As to the quality of the scripts on Deadcat, I don't know of
any that should be avoided. They do, however, fall into two
distinct groups. Many are just what other people have cooked
up to suit their needs and make little or no concession to
portability. These can require significant modification before
they can be used in a different environment. Other scripts do
attempt to be generally applicable, but the original authors
might not have had access to some of the equipment that you
use. As a result, they might also require some tweaking.

I'm sorry to be so vague, but I really think that you are the
only person who is in a position to decide what should be
monitored and why. Once that is done, others should be able
to advise on suitable methods.

Cheers, Phil.
 


-- 
We have only two things to worry about: That things will never get
back to normal, and that they already have.

--
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
To unsubscribe from this list, or to subscribe to the bb-digest list
send e-mail to mailto:majordomo@bb4.com with unsubscribe bb -and/or-
subscribe bb-digest in the BODY of the message.