Feedstop

villagemanduo · 08-05-2011, 05:41 AM

Hi all,
A data feed from my proxy is broadcasted to my consumers outside my datacenter at remote locations through http connection. This feed suddenly times out and there is currently no way to determine when the feed actually stops until my clients mail in with a complaint.
I have thought about using a crontab to set a MAILTO if the cron job tests the connection to the proxy. can anybody guide me on how to achieve this task? i want to know when the feed goes down so i can react before my clients mail in a complaint...
Thanks

catkin · 08-07-2011, 12:57 AM

What you want to do can be broken down into several components. Which of the following do you know how to do already?

Check connection to the proxy.
Mail to yourself.
Run the proxy connection check repeatedly. You mentioned cron but this could also be done with a script which has a delayed loop.

villagemanduo · 08-09-2011, 08:15 AM

Thanks for your reply catkin, i know how to do all the three of them but cannot determine how to unify them into a single cron job... What is this other method you're talking about?

catkin · 08-09-2011, 09:42 AM

You could write a script to do all three things and either call it from cron (would fill the cron log if run very often) or the script could have something like:

Code:

while true
do
    sleep 5 # or whatever is appropriate delay
    <do whatever you need>
done

The script could normally be started at boot either from the boot scripts or cron; to start it without having to boot you could use

Code:

nohup your_script.sh &

villagemanduo · 09-01-2011, 10:09 AM

hi catkin, saw your post. great idea... my problem is the logs growing. I tried this:
MAILTO="myemail"
* * * * * / sbin / ping -c 1 192.168.100.2> /dev /null

It is supposed to move all standard output to a black hole and mail standard errors to me.... i have run it into the proxy machine and i didn't get an email.... maybe its because the system didn't time out as usual...

catkin · 09-03-2011, 01:06 AM

Do yo have something set up to send mail from the computer? Maybe sendmail or postfix.

villagemanduo · 09-13-2011, 09:49 AM

No as a matter of fact i don't... this is what the problem is. I pulled the rj45 from the proxy to see if it will trigger the mails and it didn't so i guess it didn't have a mail server instance running on the machine. i know there would be a mail script that can do this... can you recommend any?

catkin · 09-16-2011, 09:02 AM

exim, postfix and sendmail are popular choices. All are powerful programs with what can be a bewildering array of configuration options. postfix was intended to be a simpler alternative to sendmail but it grew and is almost as complex now.