Fetchmail monitoring service?

ddales · 04-10-2006, 02:15 AM

Hi all,

I have a help desk ticketing system that depends on fetchmail. I would like to know if there is a monitoring service that would be able to alert admins when fetchmail fails?

I have fetchmail set to run from cron which works pretty well. However, and it's not very often, fetchmail will sometimes fail for various reasons. I was thinking that I could scan the logs on a regular basis for fetchmail failures, and if the script finds one, let the admins know. The only problem with this is that fetchmail can fail with a whole bunch of different log entry descriptions or even for other reasons not directly related to fetchmail.

Has anyone written an effective script to watch for fetchmail failures? Or is there maybe another service available that might be helpful in this situation?

Thanks in advance!

Environment:
OpenSuse 10
Fetchmail 6.2

unSpawn · 04-10-2006, 05:51 AM

If you look at "man fetchmail" you'll see under "EXIT CODES" there are two exit codes you should not react to. The rest you could use. Just use a case statement with the exit code. Stupid example:

Code:

/path/to/fetchmail --flags -f /some/config 2>&1>/dev/null; case "$?" in
0|1) ;;
14) true | mail -s "Fetchmail on $(hostname) sez \"server busy\" on $(date)" addressees@somedoma.in;;
*) ;;
esac; exit 0