Check that the vpn is up and running in nagios
A problem I had to deal with once, was to be able to use nagios to know when the VPN stopped working. The conflict I had by just using simple private network ping checks is that I was unable to easily tell at first glance whether it was the VPN that had a problem or the whole network.
Thus, I wrote this little script that receives three arguments and is able to tell whether it is actually the VPN that has any problems. Besides, it also checks for packet loss and is able to detect if the whole public network goes down.
The three arguments that receives this check are the following:
- Public IP Address: A public IP address to ping in order to know whether the network is working properly.
- Private (VPN) IP Address: A private network IP address to ping in order to know whether the VPN is working properly.
- Number of pings: Total number of pings to send in order to know more about packet loss.
The check issues a CRITICAL only if there is 100% ICMP loss while pinging the private network and the public network is suffering less than 100% ICMP loss.
The check issues a WARNING if either the public or the private or both IP addresses suffer any kind of packet loss. It also issues a WARNING if the public network suffers 100% ICMP loss.
You can download the full source code for this check in the following link: check_vpn
Call for help! Looking for contributors for pylsyncd : Python Live Syncing Daemon
Are you looking for a fast and reliable solution to keep contents synchronized among different systems in different locations? Either if you want to synchronize a few contents or even several terabytes of data, pylsyncd may be the right solution for you.
The application pylsyncd stands for Python Live Syncing Daemon and is a clear alternative to lsyncd. At a lower level, pylsyncd is written in python. It uses pyinotify to detect changes in the files and then launches rsync processes to keep everything properly synchronized.
Apart from being way more efficient than it's C-programmed counterpart, pylsyncd offers many more features and mechanisms that improve both performance and reliability, being the main advantage of pylsyncd against lsyncd is that it uses message queues in order to synchronize in a parallel way several destination servers, saving up time when it is required to have more than one destination. It has been tested in heavy loaded environments of over 70TeraBytes.
At this stage, we have tested thoroughly each and any part of pylsyncd. We have several people from all over the world using pylsyncd in production for over half a year now, with no issues, under heavy load environments, moving several TeraBytes of data. There are already some contributors to the source code, but we are looking to expand our community and make this promising project even larger.
Either if you could ever be a potential user of this application or not, if you are somewhat skilled in python, you are very welcome to come by and give us a hand, not only by improving the source code, applying QA or making performance tweaks. There are a lot of features that still need to be implemented.
We count on you!
Check that a physical link is up with the proper speed
This check is great to detect when a network cable for whatever reason deteriorates and stops providing the desired up-link speed. It works perfectly for any system that has ethtool installed.
This particular check has helped me as a sysadmin to detect bad quality cables that, after being reused many times, end up deteriorating and do not let me get 1Gbps in RJ-45 CAT 5E cables. I have also been able to detect network card failures, and also malfunctioning switch ports.
Check that any network filesystem partition is correctly mounted
A colleague of mine, Thomas Blanchin, has improved my glusterfs mounted nagios check so that it works properly with any network file system. It generates the proper output and can be used for any network file system without much trouble.