How to monitor the health of the MailScanner architecture

[Brandon Checketts]

Nagios actually can do this.  Check out the section on 'passive checks'  at
http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/passivechecks.html.

You'd have to create something to send automated emails every so often, then
have it delivered to a script that parses out the timestamp and writes to the
nagios external command file in the specified format.

Thanks,
Brandon Checketts


Jonas A. Larsen wrote:
> 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
> 
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> 
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> 
>  
> 
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> 
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> 
>  
> 
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