Subject: ANNOUNCE: mon-0.37l, service monitoring daemon
From: [email-masked] (Jim Trocki)
Date: 21 Jul 1998 16:24:05 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl.announce,comp.lang.perl.modules

MON version 0.37l
-----------------

WHAT IT IS
----------

    An extensible service monitoring daemon which can be used to monitor
    network or non-network resources.  Written in Perl 5, this code should
    be able to run out-of-the-box on many platforms. It supports a flexible
    configuration file, and can send out email, alphanumeric pages, or any
    other type of alert when it detects the failure of a service. Service
    monitors that come with the distribution can test ping, telnet, ftp,
    smtp, http, nntp, pop3, imap, disk space, SNMP queries, and arbitrary
    TCP services.

Changes since last announcement:
--------------------------------

$Id: CHANGES,v 1.7 1998/07/13 04:23:53 trockij Exp $

Changes between mon-0.37k and mon-0.37l
---------------------------------------
-Config parser change from Michael Griffith <[email-masked]> that
 complains when "alertafter" will never trigger an alert.

-Added "savestate" and "loadstate". Currently these only save
 and load the state of things disabled.

-The server now can authenticate clients using a simple
 configuration file which can restrict certain users to
 using only some (or all) commands. "moncmd" was updated
 to support this feature.

-Addition of "upalerts" which may be called when a service
 changes state from failure to success. "upalerts" can be
 controlled by the "upalertafter" parameter.

-"alertevery" now ignores detailed output when it decides
 whether or not to send an alert. Patch submitted by
 brian moore <[email-masked]>.

-"hostgroup and hyphen" patch. This simple patch will allow
 hyphens and periods in hostgroup tags.

-Multiline output fixes in smtp.monitor <[email-masked]>

-Now monitors are not called when no host arguments are supplied. This
 can be overridden with the per-service "allow_empty_group" option.

-A fix to ftp.monitor by Tiago Severina <[email-masked]> which allows
 for multiple 220 lines in the greeting from the FTP server.

-Added snpp.alert, contributed by Mike Dorman <[email-masked]>.
 This requires the SNPP Perl module.

-Added ldap.monitor, contributed by David Eckelkamp <[email-masked]>.
 This requires the Net::LDAPapi module.

-Added dns.monitor, contributed by David Eckelkamp <[email-masked]>.
 This requires the Net::DNS module.

-Monitor definitions can now include shell-like quoted words, as defined by
 the Text::ParseWords module (included with perl5). e.g.:
 	monitor something.monitor -f "this is an argument" -a arg

-"allow_empty_group" is a new per-service option. If set, monitors will
 still be run even if all hosts in the applicable hostgroup have been
 disabled. The default is that allow_empty_group is not set.

-Monitors are now forked with stdin connected to /dev/null.

-Added "stop" and "start" commands which let make the server cease from
 scheduling any monitors. While stopped, clients can still be handled. The
 server may be started[sic] in "stopped" mode with -S. There is now a
 "reset stopped", which is an atomic version of "reset" and "stop". This
 is useful if you want to re-disable things immediately after a reset,
 so there will be no race conditions after the reset and before you
 disable things.

 opstatus.cgi now also reports the state of the scheduler.

-Updated documentation for monitors, the main "mon" manual,
 and the "moncmd" manual.

-Fixed a few problems in handle_client that had to do with shutting
 the server down.

AVAILABILITY
------------

    http://ftp.kernel.org/software/mon/
    http://consult.ml.org/~trockij/mon/

    ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/software/admin/mon/
    ftp://consult.ml.org/pub/mon/

    From CPAN:

    CPAN/authors/id/T/TR/TROCKIJ

REQUIREMENTS
------------

    "mon" uses Perl 5.n, where n >= 004.

    You'll need the Time::Period module, available from your local
    CPAN archive (http://www.perl.com/perl).

    The monitors that come with the distribution are all optional, and
    are not required for the normal operation of the daemon. However,
    you'll probably want to use most of them.

    Different monitors and alerts may require some extra Perl modules,
    or some auxiliary programs. Follow the specific instructions for
    each monitor or alert.

Jim Trocki
Computer System and Network Engineer
Transmeta Corporation
Santa Clara, CA
[email-masked]