RE: [hobbit] checking websites and DNS registration with xymon

["David Hay Currie" <dhaycurrie (at) leisurefitness.com>]

Thanks Henrik.
I got the dnsreg working, which is great because one of the domains was expired since Saturday and I did not know about it.
I can't really write scripts, so for me writing a script is a bit difficult. I can understand some of the coding, but I have never studied programming.
So, that brings me to the problem that I have no idea how to write a script to check the IP address of a domain. If you could put an example of the IP script it would be a great help.
About my point 3 for the DoS of the server. We have 30 domains, and they are all pointing to the same web page. Whenever a http check fails, it fails for 2 domains at the same time, that is why I think either it creates a bottleneck on the server, or at the xymon server. I doubt the xymon server is the problem, so I am thinking the IIS server for the web site gets confused or worked up :p.
This does not happen with the other 3 domains that have separate hosting and web pages.

David 


-----Original Message-----
From: Henrik "Størner [mailto:henrik (at) hswn.dk] 
Sent: Friday, October 09, 2009 4:28 PM
To: hobbit (at) hswn.dk
Subject: Re: [hobbit] checking websites and DNS registration with xymon

In <261E4C2F69FE064286B5E84262CE5F9258A40E (at) leisure-mail.Leisure.com> "David Hay Currie" <dhaycurrie (at) leisurefitness.com> writes:

>I am trying to monitor websites that we have. Most of DNS domains points
>to the same web site.

>1.       How can I check the status of the domain registration? There is
>a dnsreg in the xymon demo pages, but I did not find any information
>regarding this feature or how to set it up

The 'dnsreg' status is a quickly hacked together script that uses data
from "whois" to determine when the domain expires. Not pretty, and not
particularly portable - it just works for those top-level domains I
have registered.

You can see the script now at http://www.hswn.dk/hobbit-cgi/viewconf.sh?dnsreg


>2.       How can I monitor the IP address that a domain has. In the demo
>pages there is a check for IP, which probably would do what I want

It is pretty straight-forward to write a script that checks the output
from a "host www.mydomain.com" against a static IP...


>3.       Currently I am just checkin by using "0.0.0.0
>www.domainname.com # noconn http://www.domainname.com"; which works, but
>once an hour a couple of checks go red at the same time, and this is
>most likely due to slow response from the server. Basically I want to
>avoid DoSing the web server with my tests. Suggestions?

I seriously doubt that your server would be DoS'ed by the single request
every 5 minutes that Xymon generates - if it does, then you have a whole
different problem!

You can increase the timeout (--timeout=N option to bbtest-net), or you
can add a "badhttp:1:2:3" option to those entries in bb-hosts, then they
won't go red until after 3 failed tests (see the "badTEST" description in
the bb-hosts(5) man-page).


Regards,
Henrik

-- 
Henrik Storner

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