[Xymon] Bug? procs test going red green every hour

[John Horne]

On Fri, 2024-03-22 at 10:10 +1100, Jeremy Laidman wrote:
> This seems to be an artefact of the "xymon" command, perhaps sanitising
> input.
>
I would agree.

>
> So I think the issue is triggered for you when the ps output has "sed ...
> security.cron:<space>".
>
> I suspect if you clean up the output of the "ps" line in xymonclient-linux.sh
> to remove trailing whitespace, then it might fix your problem. Something like
> this:
>
> ps -Aww f -o
> pid,ppid,user,start,state,pri,pcpu,time:12,pmem,rsz:10,vsz:10,cmd | sed 's/
> *$//'
>
Unfortunately that doesn't work.

I am more wondering if xymon is somehow seeing or at least treating the 'sed'
command as if it had an escaped newline at the end (perhaps after stripping
spaces). So it appends the following line to it.

If I modify the current 'sed' command to make it all on one line (no escape
characters), then it all works fine.

Ironically I have found that in our local analysis.cfg file the clamd/freshclam
processes were configured as:

PROC    "%^/usr/sbin/clamd -c" TEXT=clamd
PROC    "%^/usr/bin/freshclam -d" TEXT=freshclam

So the commands must be at the beginning of the command line. Looking at
'hostdata' for other servers I could see that other commands we monitor were
corrupted by the run-parts sed command. However, these did not cause the procs
test to go red. The reason was, using 'dnsmasq' as an example, because they
were defined differently in the analysis.cfg file:

PROC    /usr/sbin/dnsmasq TEXT=dnsmasq

In this case what is looked for ('/usr/sbin/dnsmasq') is still found regardless
of whether it appears at the start of the command-line or not. So reconfiguring
the clamd and freshclam entries allows them to work as well (i.e the procs test
remains green).


John.

--
John Horne | Senior Operations Analyst | Technology and Information Services
University of Plymouth | Drake Circus | Plymouth | Devon | PL4 8AA | UK
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