[Xymon] Need client for Mac hosts

Sat Dec 23 04:11:01 CET 2023

Ah, I forgot to mention: as a bonus, the thin-client script/approach is
trivial to use over ssh, which satisfies a number of security concerns with
Xymon traffic, namely encryption and authentication, in addition to
questions about perceived "unsupported binaries that can't/wont be
patched". It's likely to be my deployment method in future, until a future
release of Xymon natively achieves these goals.

J

On Sat, 23 Dec 2023 at 14:02, Jeremy Laidman <jeremy at laidman.org> wrote:

> The only binary that the Xymon client actually requires for all data
> collecting features is the logfetch program. This is only used for three
> things: 3) to get the log messages since the last time it was run (and keep
> track of its position in the log files) for MSGS entries in analysis.cfg,
> 2) to get file and dir information for "FILE" and "DIR" entries in
> analysis.cfg, and 1) to get the timestamp for the [clock] section of the
> client data message. If you don't need any of these features, then you can
> simply copy the xymonclient.sh and xymonclient-darwin.sh scripts into place
> and run the former, which executes the latter. Almost.
>
> What else would be missing is the xymon binary, which is used by
> xymonclient.sh to send the client data message it has constructed, to the
> Xymon server. You have a few options here. You could copy "xymon" onto your
> Mac, and setup the environment appropriately, and it would probably work
> just fine. Or instead use one of the
> <https://xymon.sourceforge.io/xymon/help/xymon-tips.html#noinstall>bash,
> perl or telnet scripts that emulate the Xymon client binary.
>
> The xymond-rclient.sh script mentioned by others would probably do what
> you want also. It essentially copies the client .sh files through an SSH
> connection, every time it runs. To be honest, I don't think this is the
> best option - the rclient script is really only a last resort for
> unsupported platforms that run UNIXy operating systems, as it's a massive
> and not well-structured script that probably has bugs galore, probably uses
> far more resources than it deserves, and also seems to uncover
> idiosyncrasies in some versions of UNIX that trip it up. Feel free to give
> it a go, and if it works, let the author (yours truly) know so Darwin/MacOS
> can be added to the "works on" list.
>
> There is an alternative to rclient that might work for you. Let me know if
> you're interested. It's a lot leaner and simpler (the comments, error
> handling and argument parsing are probably more lines than the core code
> that does the work). I call it a "thin client" because that it's a Xymon
> client with the absolute bare minimum. It was specifically written so that
> no foreign (to the OS) binaries are required, and it provides most of the
> client features using only shell scripts and built-in OS binaries.
>
> This "thin client" script essentially runs the xymonclient-<OS>.sh script,
> captures the output, appends a [clock] section, prepends the Xymon message
> header for a client message, and that's it. How you get the output to the
> Xymon server is then up to you. You could send the output to a file, and
> collect it periodically using rsync/scp/NFS. If you want your clock
> timestamp to be useful, you probably want to run it in real time, so from
> your Xymon server you can do "ssh <host> /usr/local/bin/xymon-thin-client |
> xymon 127.1 @" - probably run from a tasks.cfg entry. In your case, you
> just need the thin client script and the xymonclient-darwin.sh script on
> your Mac, plus an ssh key in ~xymon/.ssh/authorized_keys, then with a
> suitable task on your Xymon server you're done.
>
> Just to re-state the caveat: because logfetch is not used, what's missing
> is log message collection and file/dir data required for MSGS, FILE and DIR
> checks in analysis.cfg.
>
> Cheers
> Jeremy
>
>
> On Fri, 22 Dec 2023 at 18:38, Brian Scott <bscott at bunyatech.com.au> wrote:
>
>> 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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