Subj : Re: Network Monitoring
To   : Brian Rogers
From : Wilfred van Velzen
Date : Thu May 27 2021 11:25 am

Hi Brian,

On 2021-05-26 16:50:00, you wrote to me:

 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.

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

That needs cooperation of the sysop to install and open up the SNMP "daemon" to 
the outside. If they do that they should be aware of the security risks...

If you just check your links by "pinging" if their binkp poort is connectable, 
there is no security risk.

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

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

I wasn't asking how to do it, I was asking what the difference was between the 
two methods. In my opinion both methods can give you the same information, so 
you don't need to do a separate ping to know if a system is online or not.

 WvV>> I wasn't talking about latency, that's totally not interesting when
 WvV>> it 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
 WvV>> at the state of your outbound directories.

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

Again: You don't need to ping, just look at what's in your outbound... ;)

Bye, Wilfred.

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