System administration question

[Martin Hudec]

Hello Paul,

Paul Schmehl wrote:
> I thought about doing that as well, but I'm wondering if there is 
> something that already exists.  (No sense in reinventing the wheel.)  
> Also, feeding the info to a database so trending information would be 
> available as well would probably be a nice feature.

Well I wasn't looking for it :) I reinvented it, because I needed to 
learn the shell a bit better than I knew at that time.

I hope that there are alternatives out there.. :).

> The problem I have is I have one server running everything: list 
> software (mailman), smtp (postfix), imap (courier-imapd), web 
> (apache13/mod_ssl), webmail (squirrelmail), dns (bind9) and bulletin 
> board software (ultimatebb).  The website gets over 5 million 
> hits/month, so I don't want to add any more daemons, if I don't have to.
> 
> Something that spawns a short-term shell or process daily in the early 
> morning hours would probably be the best solution.

I think you would like to continuously monitor your services, not just 
on those early morning hours. Continuous monitoring is nice thing.
Take munin as example, it has two ports, munin-main (as master doing all 
the work) and munin-node (small daemon listening on port 4949 - 
configurable - just providing information for munin-main on demand).

Also nagios could be (recommended) running its main part outside that 
one heavyused server.

Cheers,
Martin