This is a fairly general question. I have a task to write a perl script that gathers information from about 40 of our linux servers for monitoring. This information will be emailed to a sysadmin every morning for review. My question is what exactly should be monitored on the boxes? So far, I have the following items:

-binary md5 sums
-disk usage
-who is logged on
-running processes
-recently altered files
-files without user or group ownership
-files with global write perms or setuid or setgid

Those would be monitored on every server. I suppose that there is more to monitor depending on what the server is used for (webserver, fileserver, mailserver, etc.) Can anybody point me to a website or give me some info about what else I should include in this report?

Thanks

I recommend looking at the LogWatch package or maybe LogCheck. LogWatch handles daily reports of various systems. It sends a nicely formatted email to the admin of the box every day with info about what was written to the log files or general system reports like disk usage.

No sense reinventing the wheel! Use what's out there and save yourself some trouble writing a complicated script. Your time could be better spent looking at customizing that package to give you better output so it's providing the info you really need.

I also recommend looking at the tripwire package for info about binary checksums.