[ale] Q and REsolved(?): Perl 'Expect' timeout question

[Jerald Sheets]

On Oct 4, 2010, at 3:48 PM, Mills John M-NPHW64 wrote:

> Jerald -
> 
> Give me a bit more information and I'll look into alternatives.
> 


I'm a huge proponent of the Xymon system for "getting info" and if things are not answering in ways I expect, alerting on them.  Xymon is the great-grandchild of the old Big Brother monitor that was ultimately bought by Quest.  Henrik (the guy who wrote it) had built an add-on that was a better data collector than the first product, and he essentially rebuilt the product from his add-on and open-sourced it.

Many people tend to look at this as not much more than a monitor (which is useful in and of itself).  I use it in a myriad of other ways, though.  I can have the client run a specified script/tool/command on a scheduled basis and then have another script watch for certain output.  if the output is cool, I hear nothing.  If there's a problem, I get an email/text/page/Google Voice.  It takes a little setup on the front end, but ultimately has streamlined a lot of my management tasks that you usually build scripts for that run on a schedule.  The other side-benefit is that the process runs remotely, moving the load generated by the checks from the server side out to the clients.  

I think Henrik viewed the server + clients more as a framework over which various types of messages travel rather than a bunch of clients "what do things and report about it".  As a result, you have this system whereby you can have some checks run locally on each system and you can have others run from your admin server.  You can set thresholds and "reactions" based on what the monitor sees.  Best yet, it's all free.

In the case of pushing changes and things, puppet seems to be the way to go, although with new development cfengine seems to be resurging in popularity.  I like both, I've just not had the need to use either any time recently.


--jms