[mrtg] mrtg is spamming me

[Stuart McGraw]

On 11/25/2011 07:36 PM, Steve Shipway wrote:
>> I installed mrtg-2.17.0 packaged for Fedora-15. I used cfgmaker to
>> generate a working config file for one server and one client (a
>> laptop) machine. Things seemed to be working correctly until I
>> shutdown the laptop.
> 
> This is correct; once the target is shut down, SNMP polls will fail.
> This will cause MRTG to complain as it cannot get a response from the
> target.
> 
>> 2011-11-21 17:30:01: WARNING: Could not match
>> host:'public at haru:::::2' ref:'Ip' key:'10.1.65.65'
> 
> This is MRTG saying it cannot work out which interface corresponds to
> this IP; unsurprisingly, since the host in question is down.

Ah, OK.  The message looked a little "internal" so I was 
wondering if I had stimulated some bug by virtue of my 
mrtg configuration inexperience.  I understand now that 
that was not the case and mrtg is working as intended.

>> How do I tell mrtg to ignore a machine that is unavailable?
> 
> You cannot; MRTG is intended to monitor things that are always there
> rather than  things that come and go.  If you need to ignore error
> messages of this type, just discard the logs.  I assume you have the
> system set to email you any failure logs?  Just stop doing this.

OK.  Thanks for the very informative reply.