<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 3:22 PM, Steve Shipway <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:s.shipway@auckland.ac.nz">s.shipway@auckland.ac.nz</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">Yes, you can do this, but it is a bit more complicated. Here’s
a way to achieve it.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">First, write a plugin for NRPE (exit status 0, output one line
of text containing number) that can collect the metrics you’re interested
in. For example, a small script that downloads a file from a specified
location and times the transfer, then returns the transfer time in seconds for
each of the two sites as two separate values in the output text. NOTE:
Your plugin should ALWAYS exit in less than 30 sec.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">Install a small testing satellite server at the various
locations you wish to test from. If you have VMWare then a VM would be
perfect. On this server, install the Nagios NRPE agent, and this new
plugin, and configure NRPE to accept commands from your MRTG server.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">On your MRTG server, install mrtg-nrpe (comes with the Routers2
software, in C or Perl). For each remote server, configure a Target that
uses mrtg-nrpe as a data collection plugin to query the remote NRPE and run the
NRPE plugin you designed at the start. This returns a pair of values in
seconds which you can graph. Make good use of the Forks: directive to
ensure that your checks all complete within the 5min window.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">And voila, you have a graph of FTP performance form each site,
with the ‘in’ and ‘out’ lines being the response times
of your two FTP servers! You can use a similar method to
create plugins to monitor other network protocols.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">We have done something similar for remote monitoring of mail
queues.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">Feel free to email me directly if you’d like a bit more
help with this.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">Steve</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">Steve Shipway</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 10pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">ITS Unix Services Design Lead</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 10pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">University of Auckland</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 10pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">Floor 2, 58 Symonds Street</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-size: 10pt; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">09 3737599 ext 86487</span></i></p><br></div></div></blockquote><div><br>Thanks for your response Steve, I appreciate your feedback but you're right about it being a bit complicated.<br>
<br>Another issue is that I'll be connecting to several Linux machines across our WAN which have NIS so I can login with my mounted home directory and perform the testing that I need to do. However, I don't have root/sudo access on some of these machines and requesting this may take more time that what I have available for testing. <br>
<br>So if running this without sudo/root access is achievable with not too much effort I think I can give it a shot, otherwise I may need to try to resort to other networking benchmarking tools.<br><br>What do you think?<br>
<br>-Regards,<br>FuRoSh. <br></div></div>