[Xymon] Modernizing the DNS check

[Mark Felder]

On Wed, Jan 8, 2014, at 2:39, Henrik Størner wrote:
> Den 08-01-2014 06:07, Jeremy Laidman skrev:
> > On 8 January 2014 13:44, Mark Felder <feld at feld.me
> > <mailto:feld at feld.me>> wrote:
> >
> >     The question here is "Are the publicly accessible NS servers in a
> >     consistent functional state?". The goal is not to validate the data.
> >
> >
> > So, I suppose the "object" you're trying to watch is the
> > "NS" consistency state of the zone.  So yes, you'd alert against the
> > zone name such as what you've shown in your hosts.cfg example.
> 
> Testing this would essentially do
> 
>     dig example.com ns
>     <grab the list of dns servers>
>     dig @ns1 example.com soa
>     dig @ns2 example.com soa
>     <compare soa records to see if they are identical>
> 
> Xymon can do the DNS lookups, all that is needed is to cook up the 
> necessary data analysis.
> 
> I think this should be a separate test from the normal "dns" column?
> 
>

That is basically all I need at this point. Anything else would require
a far more clever tool in my opinion. A separate column makes sense as
well. Anything to avoid the unnecessary addition of more monitoring
software that will get neglected. Right now we monitor nearly everything
we need in Xymon and the thought of having to deploy Nagios or something
else that implements this functionality is far from ideal. The fewer
systems I have to train people on the better.