How to monitor the health of the MailScanner architecture

[Jonas A. Larsen]

Hi Alistair and Gareth too.

 

I have used nagios for many years. However if you read my mail again, I
specifically don’t need to know the queue size or the status of the MTA,
none of those can give you a definitive answer about whether or not mail
flow is working, I need something that can check if mail is flowing and if
its delayed.

 


/Jonas

 

From: mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info
[mailto:mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info] On Behalf Of Alistair
Carmichael
Sent: 9. juli 2007 12:31
To: MailScanner discussion
Subject: RE: How to monitor the health of the MailScanner architecture

 

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

 


This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended
solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed.
If you have received this email in error please notify the system manager.
This message contains confidential information and is intended only for the
individual named. If you are not the named addressee you should not
disseminate, distribute or copy this e-mail.


This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended
solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed.
If you have received this email in error please notify the system manager.
This message contains confidential information and is intended only for the
individual named. If you are not the named addressee you should not
disseminate, distribute or copy this e-mail.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.mailscanner.info/pipermail/mailscanner/attachments/20070709/0b906d43/attachment.html