How to monitor the health of the MailScanner architecture

[Jonas A. Larsen]

Hi Glenn
> >
> Um, just script up a snippet that send a mail through to a service
> account (use telnet with expect, or perl or whatever... Make that
> sending snippet a function/sub/procedure and let it take an argument
> servername, then loop through the list of servers.... You know what to
> do:-), then use an automated MUA in the same script (whatever you
> need) to check that it is received within a reasonable time... Nail
> within an expect script would be nice for that last bit ... How hard
> can it be:-):-).
> You'd have to keep an eye on reasonable timing, and think through how
> to report errors...
> Could probably be incorporated as a testscript into any monitoring
> app... Or run from cron with some reasonable regularity.
> Should be fairly easy to write up ... But I'm on vacation, so you do
> it yourself;-).
> This is precisely what is needed :) regarding the "fairly easy to write
up" I guess that depends on how elite coding scriptiong skills you have and
how much time you got :)

We currently got it running using a freeware windows monitoring tool, that
had this precise check.

I was just looking for something that already existed and general comments.
(because I'm a lazy boy)

People seem to have misunderstood it a bit since they are recommending
generic monitoring solutions. Neither nagios, bigbrother or others have the
above solution. I actually think munin had something but it would have to be
re-scripted to be useable (assuming I don’t want to run munin)

I do find it odd though, that more or less nobody appears to be monitoring
their mail systems in this way. I still say it’s the only way to be 100% if
your system is functioning or not. Checking the mta daemon, mailscanner
daemon, queue sizes etc. are all not a perfect way to check if the
mailscanning process is functioning.

Cheers

Med venlig hilsen / Best regards
 
Jonas Akrouh Larsen

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