[Xymon] Purple storm

[Jeremy Laidman]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 5:15 AM, Poppy, Ben
<poppy.ben at marshfieldclinic.org> wrote:
> I have an interesting problem that happened last night. We are working on a
> DR test. Part of that test includes shutting down some DC’s in our DR
> datacenter. When that happened, most tests that are initiated from the xymon
> servers (http, dns, ssh, ftp, etc) to the monitored server went purple.

For network tests, Xymon resolves the IP address from the servername
(typically using DNS), and then uses that IP address to perform the
test.  The IP address in the hosts.cfg file is not normally used for
network tests.  So if your DNS fails, Xymon's network tests fail also.

You can prevent this, and use the IP address supplied in hosts.cfg, by
adding "testip" to each hosts.cfg entry that requires it.  You can add
it to a ".default." entry so that it applies to all hosts.

J