Subj : Re: Network Monitoring
To   : Wilfred van Velzen
From : Brian Rogers
Date : Wed May 26 2021 04:50 pm

Hello Wilfred;

-=> Wilfred van Velzen wrote to Brian Rogers <=-

 WvV>> 1) You want to check if your downlinks are connectable.

 WvV>> 2) And August (I think) was looking for a nice way to visualize all
 WvV>> the connections between fidonet systems. So you could see how echo
 WvV>> and netmail flows through the net.

The desired example was using RRDTool graphing which requires SNMP. A sysop
not familiar with that could accidentally flag his system as writable and
be taken over by a 3rd party.

 WvV> I don't see a security issue in doing 1). And for 2) you need the
 WvV> cooperation of the node.

See above. We can't expect all sysops to be certified sysadmins! For most
this is a hobby and the more complex it's made, the less fun it becomes.

 WvV> his data simply isn't available for fidonet. You would need to have
 WvV> the cooperation of a large number of sysops, to be able to analyse
 WvV> the incoming pkt files on their system in an uniform way, and send
 WvV> the data to a central place where it could be analysed and visualized
 WvV> on a website... Good luck with that! ;-)

Again as I said above, the more complex this is made, the less fun it becomes.

 WvV>> What's the difference between looking at what's in your outbound, and
 WvV>> notice there are files for a system that have not been send because
 WvV>> your mailer failed to connect to it; or doing a periodic ping to that
 WvV>> system to find out if it's still online?

On linux, a very simple shell script can be used. I would guess in powershell
a parallel could be done too... I don't use Windows so I wouldn't know. Just
search the contents of your outbound directory for files and if they exist
then sites are down. Not rocket science :)

 WvV> My point was, the mailer, because it will do automatic periodic polls
 WvV> when it can't deliver it's mail, is the monitoring tool. You don't need
 WvV> extra software for this to find out a node is offline.

One such script could tail the mailer log file as well... there's a ton of
ways this could be done.

 WvV> I wasn't talking about latency, that's totally not interesting when it
 WvV> comes to delivering mail to nodes. The only interesting bit is,
 WvV> wheather it's online or not. And that is easy to find out by looking at
 WvV> the state of your outbound directories.

You didn't but someone else did. I don't think that's even necessary as mail
will either go through or it won't. I was thinking of using a modified fping
as I use on amateur packet radio. It's worked very well for over 2 decades.
It may serve the purpose here.

.... Old investors never die, they just roll over.
--- MultiMail/Linux v0.52
 * Origin: SBBS - Carnage! (1:142/103)

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