OTBR: Is mail really getting through

[John Van Ostrand]

On Wed, 2007-02-14 at 12:25 -0600, John Schmerold wrote:
> Systems like Nagios do a fine job of making sure that an SMTP server is 
> up, however it does not confirm mail is flowing. This morning, something 
> was causing Postfix to throw "450 Server configuration problems" 
> rejections (I think policyd died), a quick reboot solved the problem.
> 
> I want to know about this before the phone rings.
> 
> To me: a logical solution would be a program that sends emails every 10 
> minutes to itself through a relay, then checks its account via POP3 to 
> make sure it got the message. If it doesn't get the email with 5 minutes 
> it starts alerting me through SMS, fax, phone call whatever.
> 
> Anyone know of such a beast?
> 
> BTW: OTRB is OT But Related

Couldn't that be a Nagios script?

Have a cron job submit the email at 1/5 (cron-speak) minutes, then have
a Nagios script pull in at 0/5 to verify. That would give a full 4
minutes for the email server to process it. It would make sense to put a
distinct tag in the email to make sure it sees the correct message.


-- 
John Van Ostrand                       Net Direct Inc.
CTO, co-CEO                   564 Weber St. N. Unit 12
                                  Waterloo, ON N2L 5C6
john at netdirect.ca                     ph: 518-883-1172 x5102
Linux Solutions / IBM Hardware        fx: 519-883-8533
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