Daily and Weekly Periodic Scripts

[Doug Hardie]

> On 22 February 2017, at 01:53, Matthew Seaman <matthew at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> On 02/22/17 09:32, Frank Leonhardt wrote:
>> For what it's worth, in a similar situation I simply have a cron
>> triggered script that greps certain files (or the output of certain
>> utilities) and fires off an email if it finds/doesn't find certain
>> things. Very simple and flexible, and it keeps nagging if I don't do
>> anything about it. I keep thinking of doing something more gala, but
>> over many years I've found this actually works for me.
>> 
> 
> If anyone is looking for a project, teaching hte daily / weekly /monthly
> scripts to produce output in a machine parseable form, like JSON or UCL
> suitable for injecting into a system like logstash would be pretty useful.
> 
> As it is, the nightly email generated by FreeBSD don't scale well beyond
> a few dozen machines.  If you're dealing with an installation of that
> size, you'ld be better off redirecting hte output to a log file on the
> server and then setting up appropriate monitoring to tell you about any
> problems as they occur -- eg. through nagios or icinga or the like.


I investigated teaching the scripts to output JSON, but that is a big project.  However, even when that is done, I still would need something to parse it to find the problems.  Thats not trivial either.

I like the idea of moving those checks over to nagios which I am using on all the machines anyway.  I decided to start with the daily netstat numbers.  However, there are some things I don't understand about them and a problem with disappearing addresses that I will send separately.  Thanks to all.