January 2008

Monthly Archive

2008-01-28

DEC 2008 – Chicago

Posted by Robert Auch under Business, Domain Controllers
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I have been invited to present at the Directory Experts Conference in Chicago in March, hosted by NetPro Computing, Inc.. I’ll be discussing how we recently integrated dozens of Linux servers into our 300+ server Windows 2000 Native Mode forest. I’m excited, but it’s taking away from the time to update a few things here I have in “unpublished” state.

Of note is a response for T. Colin Dodd regaring his short and sweet post regarding Red Hat Flaws according to Secunia. In short, Mr. Dodd (please correct me if the address is wrong), yes, Red Hat should be proud of what they’ve accomplished, but…

Well, that’s 2 pages of text that’s not yet finished.

 

2008-01-12

Script: Check Webserver availability

Posted by Robert Auch under Networking, Open Source Software
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We’ve been having some server uptime/stability issues, and aren’t getting alerts from HP Systems Insight Manager (HP SIM) that the services are down (cause they’re not, they’re just not answering on HTTP).  So I took a copy of “responder.pl” and put it into something I wrote for totalnetsolutions.net.  What came out is actually pretty nice, easily configurable, and so far this week, very stable.

We haev this running ever 3 minutes from 3 systems: 1 Windows 2003, 1 Fedora Core 8, and 1 Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon.  Requires Net::SMTP, Config::INIFiles, LWP::UserAgent, and HTTP::Request.  The only one that I’ve needed to download and install is Config::INIFiles on any of those 3 systems.  But I do have LWP::Simple on all systems, so I’m not sure if you’ll need the last 2.  This is my first published code other than 3 line bash scripts, so be kind in comments.

Feel free to take and use / improve / update this – I’d just appreciate if you’d let me know so I can update this version here.  The parseIni() function checks that all “URL”s are in http://www.google.com format or http://64.233.167.99 format (it checks for http:// followed by text followed by what appears to be a valid TLD format, or it checks for http:// followed by an IP address).  I have yet to add in the regex to look for a valid full URI, because I didn’t need that yet.

This is upgraded over responser.pl in that:

  1. It will send to any number of SMTP recipients (comma-separated)
  2. It will silence its alerting if *all* checked addresses are down.  If the monitoring system gets unplugged from the network, it won’t attempt to send hundreds of alerts upon regaining access.  Or if you’re testing from a DSL line, you won’t get alerts because the DSL line went down, but the actual target was up.  The next version will have this as an option in the INI file.
  3. It uses standard INI file formatting, rather than a parsed text file.
  4. it runs out of the box (so to speak) on Windows (ActivePerl) or Linux (Fedora and Ubuntu both tested).
  5. It has better inline documentation.

The major problem is that a minimum of 2 URLs are needed in the INI file for the full logic to work.  You can get around this for small networks by adding in the DNS domain for one, and the IP address for the other. 

Thanks, and please share any concerns or problems.

chk-web.pl