About MRTG and NetWare
These pages are created using the MRTG graphing package and a
helper application called MRTGEXT that provides NetWare
specific information.
See Also
Overview Page
The server overview and volume statistics pages are generated by a
modified version of the scripts provided by James Drews, which is
distributed with MRTGEXT.
The role account cruxnds on the server webedit is used to
house and run these scripts.
The package is installed in ~cruxnds/pkg/nw-mrtg and
is run every half hour by a cron script on
webedit.monash.edu (ref. man crontab(1)).
At 18 and 48 minutes past the hour, the server status script
~cruxnds/pkg/nw-mrtg/servstat/servstat.pl is run. The
list of servers to check, in fully-qualified DNS form, is contained in
the configuration file servstat.cfg.
At 3 and 33 minutes past the hour, the volume status script
~cruxnds/pkg/nw-mrtg/volstat/volstat.pl is run. The list
of servers to check, in fully-qualified DNS form, is contained in the
configuration file volstat.cfg.
Both these scripts have been modified to write only HTML fragments,
these are included by server side includes into the ITS webpages.
Detail Pages
This is a mixture of dynamic pages, static pages and dynamic graphs.
The dynamic pages are used for server status summaries. These take query
strings or variables passed from a form to display specific server information.
All server utilisation pages are called
<server-name>.1.html, all server connection count pages are
called <server-name>.2.html.
MRTG is installed in ~cruxnds/bin and invoked every
five minutes by a cron script on webedit.monash.edu. The
MRTG configuration file (mrtg-webedit.cfg) and data files
are in the directory ~cruxnds/lib/mrtg2/monash, while
output files are all kept in
/web/its/novell/monitor.
The file mrtg-webedit.cfg specifies all the server
attributes that will be logged, it is laid out in sections so that
defaults for a particular attribute are specified (such as headers,
maximum values), then each server for which that attribute will be
monitored is listed, then the defaults are cleared. Please read this
file in conjunction with the MRTG manuals. A number of headers and
proformas are used so that the generated pages match the rest of the
ITS website in look and feel.
TODO
- Replace the static index pages with a dynamically generated index,
so that additional servers or attributes can be easily added.
BUGS
- Due to the large number of servers being monitored, there can be
considerable delay in receving responses to the polls. When several
servers are uncontactable for an extended period, the processes will
stall and the number of processes owned by the account cruxnds
rapidly approaches the maximum allowed by the system. When this maximum
is reached, the entire data-gathering system stops and the only solution
is for an administrative user on the webedit system to kill of
all processes owned by cruxnds.
|
