We have a process that creates a log file, and we want to archive the log files every day. The easiest way to rotate these logs is to create a batch file that copies the log file to a filename that includes the date of the file as the file name. Now, we can’t really […]

A couple of modules that we use in our ping monitoring script are Mail::Sendmail and Net::Ping::External. To install these, use the CPAN shell to search for the available Sendmail mods: root@srv-1 root # perl -MCPAN -e shell Warning [/etc/inputrc line 28]: Re-binding char #27 from [F_ViEndInsert] to meta for [91 49 126] => BeginningOfLine. cpan […]

We introduced a ping monitoring program in this article. In this article, we will start documenting our script by going over the main routine: use Time::Local; use Mail::Sendmail; use Net::Ping::External qw(ping); $pmwrap=0; while (6 ne 9){ # Loop forever… I don’t mind. system(“cp new.dnsf dnsfc”); # Each pass through the servers, copy dnsf again to […]

One particularly useful tool for systems administration is top. One thing you may not be aware of, is that you can output the information top provides to a file. You may also not know that you can run commands like this remotely via ssh. Here is a short script that demonstrates this: #!/bin/sh /usr/bin/ssh user@domain.com […]

Part Two: Configuring a Central Syslog Server By Urbana Der Ga’had In Part 1 of this article we installed and configured LogSentry to automate the monitoring of the system logs on our machine. That’s great if we’ve only got one or two systems, but what if we have a dozen *nix systems, or fifty, or […]

Part One: Installing and Configuring LogSentry by Urbana Der Ga’had If you haven’t automated the monitoring of your system logs, you’re flying blind. By proactively identifying hardware failures, unusual patterns of user behavior, and intrusion attempts, you can often solve problems before they become painful. festering. scars that won’t heal. Oh yes! In Part One […]

Do check out msinfo32.exe. Virtually everything that you would want to know about the system configuration of a Windows machine will be revealed with this command. Msinfo32.exe is located under /Program Files/Common Files/Microsoft Shared/MSInfo (at least on our system). If you wish to dump the report to a file, use: msinfo32 /report reportname.txt It takes […]

We recently had to monitor a farm of Windows servers with Performance Monitor. True, we could add one counter at a time from the various servers… point, click, wait, pulldown, click, ok, click…. aaarghhh. Burning hot pokers in the brain working on these boxes. Now, it turns out that you can edit the log settings […]

One problem with monitoring servers over a WAN is that the WAN is often down during the night. Now, if the WAN is down hard, that is a separate issue. But, just because a host does not respond to a ping does not mean the WAN is really down, or that the server is down. […]

Pf and rf are the two final subroutines we need to discuss for our Ping Monitoring Over a WAN perl script. Both modules use the Net::Ping::External module, which we chose because it works on Windows and GNU/Linux (and because of this, probably works on most every platform that perl runs on). Here is the pf […]

In this article we introduced a ping monitoring perl script. We talked about the main routine in this article. Now, let’s go over the printtime() and ckserv() functions. The printtime function simply writes a timestamp to mon.txt: sub printtime{ open (PM,”>> mon.txt”); ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst)=localtime(time); $mon++; $year=$year+1900; print PM “\n”.$mon.”/”.$mday.”/”.$year.”-“.$hour.”:”.$min.”\n”; close PM; } The >> in the […]