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On Tue, 21 Jan 2014, Rob Beard wrote:
Hi folks, I've recently been playing around with Asterisk and after some issues with a user e-mailing to say "The internet isn't working" for the Nth time it made me think back to when I used to work in radio. When I worked for a group of radio stations, each site would have a Davicom MAC device which would monitor the station and report if it went off air etc. The device was a big of of tricks which connected to an analogue phone line and if the station went off it would text the station engineers and call a number (usually redirected to the oncall engineer) and it would speak the issue (such as station off air) and prompt whoever picked up the call to clear the error by pressing a number on the keypad. I guess this is how some fire alarm systems work. This got me thinking, would it be possible to do something similar on Linux with Asterisk for server monitoring? While it's easy enough to probably get the server to flag up an issue (or have another monitoring server flag up issues) sometimes it would be nice to have something more reliable than "the internet is down" calls from users (who despite being asked nicely to give a bit more information they never seem to... sods law it's always in busy periods too!).
Personally... I'd have an external host somewhere (hosted VPS) which can monitor all the sites internet conectivity, pull SNMP logs from the routers and talk to an server on the inside (if possible, firewall & port forward, etc.) to check it's runnability. Then the hosted VPS can email/txt/phone IT staff to inform of services stopped, etc.
Of-course you've got to make sure that it's not the hosted VPS that's gone offline, but in-general that's going to be the least likely scenario when dealing with rural broadband sites.
Look at nagios, etc. Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq