[Xymon] Need client for Mac hosts

Fri Dec 22 08:37:11 CET 2023

Hi Kris,

There's more to it than that. You need something to run it regularly and 
you need some way of getting the output back to your server.

The stock standard way is like any other unix/linux system. You have a 
program called xymonlaunch running full time on the system. At regular 
(5 minute) intervals and under control of clientlaunch.cfg, it loads up 
the environment from the config file (xymonclient.cfg) and kicks in the 
xymonclient.sh script into action. This script does various pieces of 
housekeeping and runs the architecture dependant script (in your case 
xymonclient-darwin.sh). It then runs the binary file xymon to send the 
results back to your server.

As Ralph has pointed out, you can avoid running xymonlaunch and schedule 
the process using cron or whatever apple uses for running jobs these 
days. These is no systemd or init.d processing on a Mac. It's much 
uglier 😛.

The other approach is to use the rclient script.

Assuming you have ssh access to the Mac, you set up a certificate based 
ssh login on the Mac. On your server you then schedule regular running 
of the rclient script. This works through each required system and runs 
the script as a sequence of commands over ssh, capturing the output and 
handing it back to the main xymon processes. The advantage of this is 
that your don't need any binaries on the target system, just an ssh 
login. Setting up rclient and ssh keys could be a little daunting if 
you're not familiar with that sort of thing.

If you have a Mac laptop with Apple's developer tools installed, you 
could build your own binaries. Download the whole xymon source archive, 
unpack it and run 'configure --client'. Follow the prompts to install 
the result in an out of the way place (I use /usr/local/xymon). When 
built, copy that whole directory over to your target machine. Apple have 
recently changed processors from intel to arm so you need to make sure 
you are building compatible binaries. This approach is going to be much 
safer than trusting some random person on the internet to give you 
pre-compiled binaries to run.

Alternatively, installing via homebrew would be relatively painless and 
a little more trustworthy. It's actually quite simple and well designed.

Hope some of this helps,

Brian

On 22/12/2023 1:57 pm, IO Support wrote:
> So I copied xymonclient-darwin.sh onto a Mac laptop I have and just 
> ran it from a terminal to see if it would do anything.  It did display 
> a lot of great info in the terminal, but there's nothing in the script 
> that dumps the output to a tmp file or points to a Server address.  So 
> I pulled a few more files from the Sourceforge /client/ folder in the 
> hopes that the script would look for the xymonclient.cfg and send some 
> data to the server. Running the xymonclient.sh script tries to do 
> somethings, but it's looking for things in paths that don't exist 
> since I'm not actually installing anything, I'm just manually running 
> a script. I'm obviously missing some vital piece of this puzzle.  Does 
> anyone have some simple instructions or point me at whatever it is I'm 
> missing here?  I find it hard to believe there isn't someone out there 
> that's got this figured out already.
>
> Thank You,
> Kris Springer
>
> On 12/20/23 12:47 AM, Ralph M wrote:
>> As far as autostart goes, I have a bunch of clients running from 
>> cron.  Forget runclient.sh, just start the main xymonclient.sh every 
>> five minutes.  That is, you don't need to fight with systemd or 
>> init.d to get the client to report.
>>
>> Ralph Mitchell
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Dec 20, 2023 at 1:27 AM Brian Scott <bscott at bunyatech.com.au> 
>> wrote:
>>
>>     A few years ago I built a client for a Macos server. The target
>>     server is quite a few versions of macos old so probably not what
>>     you are looking for. I just built it on my Mac laptop then
>>     bundled it all up in a tar file and copied it over and did some
>>     installation. My current laptop is an M2 so I doubt I could do it
>>     again right now.
>>
>>     As I recall the xymonclient-darwin script was mostly fine. There
>>     was a little entertainment with the way Apple manages it's disks
>>     these days. I've attached what looks like the changes I made as a
>>     diff.
>>
>>     I'm not at $work at the moment so I can't check exactly what else
>>     I did. I must have done something to get it to auto start at
>>     boot. Probably didn't keep any notes either. I'll try to have a
>>     look next time I'm there.
>>
>>     Also quite possible that rclient will work well. There's some
>>     fixes that I had to do recently to account for some dropped
>>     commands from rclient when talking to FreeBSD systems so that may
>>     also be relevant.
>>
>>     Cheers,
>>
>>     Brian
>>
>>
>>     On 19/12/2023 3:58 pm, Ralph M wrote:
>>>     I would guess the script in the repository is the latest
>>>     version.  I'm not a Mac user, so take that as an opinion, not a
>>>     fact.  As part of the main distribution, any changes would have
>>>     been rolled into that file.
>>>
>>>     Ralph Mitchell
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>     On Mon, Dec 18, 2023 at 11:04 PM IO Support
>>>     <support at ionetworkadmin.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>         Where would I obtain a semi-current xymonclient-darwin.sh
>>>         script?  I will try to use the one I found in the latest
>>>         branch on Sourceforge that JC has been working on, but it
>>>         was last edited in 2015.
>>>         https://sourceforge.net/p/xymon/code/HEAD/tree/branches/4.x-master/client/xymonclient-darwin.sh
>>>
>>>         Does anyone have anything a little more current that they use?
>>>
>>>         Thank You,
>>>         Kris Springer
>>>
>>>
>>>         On 12/14/23 12:21 PM, Ralph M wrote:
>>>>         Would this do it for you??
>>>>
>>>>         http://tools.rebel-it.com.au/xymon-rclient/
>>>>
>>>>         Nothing to install on the remote host, other than SSH
>>>>         keys.  It fires the appropriate xymonclient-[OS].sh script
>>>>         down the SSH connection and collects the results.  I don't
>>>>         know anything about Macs, but the xymonclient-darwin.sh
>>>>         script is for MacOS X so that might be a good starting point.
>>>>
>>>>         Ralph Mitchell
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>         On Thu, Dec 14, 2023 at 2:38 AM I/O Network Administration
>>>>         <support at ionetworkadmin.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>             Anyone have a modern xymon-client script or app that
>>>>             will run on Mac? I'm aware of the macport method, but
>>>>             that's a large footprint and heavy handed solution to
>>>>             the simple need of collecting performance data and
>>>>             uploading it to the Server.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>             Thank You,
>>>>             Kris Springer
>>>>             I/O Network Administration
>>>>             https://www.ionetworkadmin.com
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>             _______________________________________________
>>>>             Xymon mailing list
>>>>             Xymon at xymon.com
>>>>             http://lists.xymon.com/mailman/listinfo/xymon
>>>>
>>>
>>>
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