MailScanner-mrtg errors

Spicer, Kevin Kevin.Spicer at BMRB.CO.UK
Thu May 13 08:45:48 IST 2004


Casanova, Chase wrote:

>The mountpoint is where the partition is mounted. Still don't understand why mailscanner-mrtg 
>needs it. Some kind of crossplatform-compatibility probably. Maybe that's needed on some BSD or
>Solaris (I doubt it's needed for Linux) ?

Then let me explain.  The graphs are % free space, you can only show % free space on a filesystem, not a directory.  MailScanner-MRTG uses the df command, which as far as I'm aware will show the % for the filesystem when given a directory, but....  I deliberately raise an error when the specified directory is not a mountpoint so that people have to set it to a mountpoint, then at least folks know what they are really monitoring.  I have made the error message for this even clearer in the next version.  This may go away in the future if/when I implement dynamically generated html pages.

>I still wanna take a good look at mailscanner-mrtg, because I don't trust it's graphs yet (I
>think it counts double: it also counts things like notices, etc. then the spamratio is also 
>impacted, I think that's silly).

No one else has reported double counts, however this could be a quirk of your setup or a bug in the logfile processing for your MTA - or maybe you think its counting messages where it is counting files (some MTAs use 2 files per message).  The notices point is fair comment, at least in relation to spam and virus ratios, I'll think about ways to tackle that (probably add a config option to exclude them from the counts).  If you want to discuss these specific problems please feel free to contact me off list (at kevin at kevinspicer.co.uk, not this address thanks) and I'll do my best to help.


>Also it doesn't pick up the Network and CPU utilization (it seems to use SNMP for that, which I >don't).

It does use SNMP, however the recommended snmp configuration for MSMRTG (see the README.SNMP file provided) is bound only to the loopback address to reduce the risk of information leakage.  I switched to SNMP because it was impossible to get an accurate idea of what was going on in any other way (that was reasonably platform independent), the output of sar for this purpose (the previous approach) varied between mildly inaccurate (on busy servers) to totally misleading (on quiet servers).

Regards

Kevin



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