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Resources for “A System Monitoring Dashboard”

Issue 137

From Issue #137
September 2005

Jul 20, 2005  By John Ouellette
 in
Resources for the print article.

Listings for this Article: ftp.linuxjournal.com/pub/lj/listings/issue137/8216.tgz

GNU wget: www.gnu.org/software/wget/wget.html

Bash Reference Manual: www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html

SMTP.pm: search.cpan.org/~gbarr/libnet-1.19/Net/SMTP.pm

“How to Send Email with Perl's Net::SMTP”: perl.about.com/b/a/007039.htm

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scripts could be improved, tested more thoroughly

Anonymous...'s picture
Submitted by Anonymous... (not verified) on Tue, 10/04/2005 - 14:57.

I read the article and looked forward to trying out the scripts. It seemed like just what we need. Some very good ideas in here but the scripts should probably be tested on a more common distro and checked for compliance with FHS.

I spent a few minutes to try testing the scripts and soon decided it was not worth the effort. Please let us know if the scripts have been fixed.

First... have the scripts gone through a unix2dos filter?? Why?

For example:


debian@:~/test$ ./monitor_web.sh
: bad interpreter: No such file or directory
debian@:~/test$ hexdump -C monitor_web.sh |head -n 1
00000000 23 21 2f 62 69 6e 2f 62 61 73 68 0d 0a 23 0d 0a |#!/bin/bash..#..|

Note the "0d 0a" AKA CR-LF which confused the bash shell interpreter.

After using unix2dos to remove these... I noticed some necessary editing to do in the monitor_disk.sh script:


GREP="/sbin/grep"
MOUNT="/sbin/mount"
AWK="/usr/bin/awk"

... why bother.... normally these are in the path... if it is really necessary to put the commands in variables... why not make it easy for readers and use locations that will just work. or even better, use "which" to set your variables. grep and mount are usually not in /sbin.

After this, I noticed that one script requires ksh. Not a big deal but, not mentioned in the article.

Thanks for the ideas though. I may consider writing a simple ssh based monitoring system.

In defence of the author:

Kurt Rudahl's picture
Submitted by Kurt Rudahl (not verified) on Wed, 02/15/2006 - 04:31.

In defence of the author: ("these things are usually on the path...")

These are intended to be run by cron, where the normal user path may not be available. It is customary to supply an explicit path in such cases (which will, naturally, vary with the system).

RE: scripts could be improved, tested more thoroughly

John Ouellette's picture
Submitted by John Ouellette on Mon, 10/31/2005 - 15:13.

Hi. Thanks for the feedback! That's the whole point of Open Source, full disclosure of code, and making it better!

As the author of the scripts they are presented as a soluton, not a product. The goal, of course, is to please as many customers as possible, and that's not always possible.

I will report great success at my company so far, which is why I wrote the article! Here' an external link for the the latest updates to these scripts:

http://monitorsuite.sourceforge.net

I personally support these in my spare time. Don't hesitate to contact me at my current email address, I welcome all feedback!

Regards,
-John

Agreed.

Anonymous Too's picture
Submitted by Anonymous Too (not verified) on Fri, 10/21/2005 - 10:54.

I, too, downloaded the scripts as they looked like a great starting point for monitoring my systems, and, sadly, I have to agree with the poster before me that these scripts are replete with bugs. Even the way they were archived is broken. It appears the author made a big no-no: he made 'innocuous' last-minute changes which he did not test, perhaps to meet the LJ deadline, and ended up submitting very broken scripts.

In addition to the problems the poster above mentions, such basic things as forgetting to put a hash mark before a comment, and not putting a space between flags are found in at least the monitor_web.sh script. I've not tested the others yet.

Author: please do fix these problems and re-post.

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