Re: [cobalt-security] (no subject)

[Matthew Nuzum <cobalt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Well, here's what I do....
FIrst, my service provider (AT&T) has an e-mail address for my phone, so
that I get SMS via a short, text only e-mail.  Yours may as well.

That said, you need one or two "Hear Beat" servers to frequently check
your production server.  This can be done via a simple ping, or you can
get more elaborate and check to make sure particular services are
available, such as POP3, SMTP, HTTP or whatever.

If your heartbeat server detects any or all monitored services are down,
it checks to make sure the other heartbeat server is alive (hopefully on
a different network).  This is important, because you don't want to get
a message telling you that your cable modem went down for 3 minutes at
2am.  (assuming your hearbeat server is at someone's home, behind a
cable modem)

So, if your hearbeat server detects a failed service, and detects that
the other heartbeat server is still online, it formulates a brief text
based e-mail and sends it to your phone.

There are lot's of opensource tools that will do this for you.  I think
Big Brother is a very highly regarded monitoring tool that you should be
able to use.

An important concept to realize is that a server can't notify you if
it's down.  Therefore you have to have a different computer monitoring
the server.  I like to have two, because if one goes down, there's
another.  They need to be separate though.  Having them side by side
won't help if your internet connection goes away.

Matt Nuzum

On Wed, 2002-02-27 at 22:59, Arun Iyer wrote:
    hi,
     
    I was looking out for some script which will monitor my server and
    intimate me via email to sms whenever the server is down.
     
    Any Ideas, pls mail me.....
    
    Regards,
    Arun Iyer
    Web Access (India) Pvt. Ltd.
    http://www.vdesignwebs.com