[vox-tech] Perl programming problem

[Josh Parsons]

On Thu, 2005-01-13 at 12:58 -0800, Richard S. Crawford wrote:

> I'm trying to write a script which will live on my server at home and
> which will ping our server at work every five minutes or so, and send an
> e-mail message when it goes down or comes back up.

You might be re-inventing the wheel... have you looked at spong
(http://spong.sf.net)?

I maintained an installation of spong at ANU, where it watched our 3 Sun
Enterprise servers.  This was some years ago, but it did basically what
you want.  A process running independently on each server would
periodically wake up and try a series of modular tests - locally based
ones like checking for disk fulls, and "remote" tests which would
involve checking that each other server's (e.g.) smtp port was listening
and speaking smtp etc etc.  Any changes in test status would be emailed
to an administrator.

It was written in perl - you might at least find it useful for seeing
how the various tests were done.

-- 
Josh Parsons
Philosophy Department
1238 Social Sciences and Humanities Bldg.
University of California
Davis, CA 95616-8673
USA
 
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