How to monitor the health of the MailScanner architecture

[Alistair Carmichael]

Hi,

The monitoring software I use - nagios is capable of this, without going into too much detail its basically a monitoring tool that can run on a webserver and then check the status of software such as your mta remotely aswell as executing local scripts on each mailscanner server to check queue sizes and report back to the nagios monitoring server via the nagios nrpe plugin, which can be configured to alert via email or even sms once certain thresholds (e.g queue size) are met. 

In our setup I wrote my own queue size monitor script but there are nrpe scripts already created for various MTA's out there.

 

Al

 

________________________________

From: mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info [mailto:mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info] On Behalf Of Jonas A. Larsen
Sent: 09 July 2007 11:04
To: mailscanner at lists.mailscanner.info
Subject: How to monitor the health of the MailScanner architecture

 

Hello all

 

I have a problem, and discussing it on the irc channel didn't turn up any obvious solution.

 

Say you have more than 1 MS box scanning mails for a specific domain. They are load balanced in some way, so the load is split over the servers.

 

Now lets say one of the servers have a problem. Not a fatal problem, so the server is still running (responds to pings etc) port 25 is still open, and exim (the mta in my case) still accepts mails.

 

But for some reason, crash, corrupt config, full root fs etc. the process of moving mails from the incoming queue to the outgoing queue is not working.

 

What I am interested in, is a system to alert me of such a problem automatically.

 

Currently the only thing, besides clients noticing mail being delayed, is for me to look at my mailscaner-mrtg graphs for the incoming queue and notice that its growing.

 

One method of doing all this automatically that we came up with, would be some complex system that would work as follows:

 

You create a domain for each MailScanner, that only that MailScanner scans for.

 

You then create an imap account on another system for each of the domains.

 

You then create a script that sends a mail to each of the accounts and after X amount of minutes check to see if the mail has arrived on the imap account. If yes, delete the mail and do the same thing again after Y amount of minutes (a cron job), if it doesn't exist something must be wrong with the mailflow, either its interrupted or is experiencing delays.

 

Do anybody have a better idea or know of something that can do this already?

 

My root file system ran full last week, and it caused mails to still be accepted (incoming is on /var on another disk) but MS was frozen because it couldn't extract attachments to /tmp which was full because it was on the same disk as the root fs.

 

I hope I have made the above somewhat clear, if not please ask me to clarify.

 

 

Med venlig hilsen / Best regards

 

Jonas Akrouh Larsen

 

TechBiz ApS

Laplandsgade 4, 2. sal

2300 København S

 

Office: 7020 0979

Direct: 33369974

Fax:    7020 0978

Mobile: 51201096

Web: www.techbiz.dk <http://www.techbiz.dk/> 

 


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