Big Sister 1.02 review

Big Sister network monitor is a real time system and network health monitoring application. Requirements: Perl modules: ·GD (r

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Thomas Aeby

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Big Sister network monitor is a real time system and network health monitoring application.

Requirements:
Perl modules:

GD (required if you attempt to use graphical displays)
Simon Leinen's SNMP (required if you attempt to monitor SNMP devices)
LWP::UserAgent (enables realhttp test and will allow you to install plugins directly from the Big Sister download site)
URI (goes together with LWP::UserAgent)
Net::SMTP (if you want Big Sister to send alarms via SMTP rather than via the "mail" command)

Other software packages:

RRDTool (required if you attempt to use performance data collection)
SpeedyCGI (speeds up Big Sister CGIs)

Note that when you are installing RRDTool and SpeedyCGI you have to make sure they install their binaries in a directory which is included in Big Sister's PATH (/usr/bin is a good choice IMHO).

Here are some key features of "Big Sister":
monitor networked systems
provide a simple real-time view of the current network status
notify you when your systems are becoming critical
generate a history of status changes
log and display a variety of system performance data

What's New in This Release:
added 'users' test to the default uxmon-net files
removed "warnings" pragmas for backwards compatibility
added distinct users perf logging to who_numusers, added graphtemplates for numusers
include documentation if available
page(): short text uses vars{hour}, vars{min}
page(): format time ("%02d:%02d") as proposed in Bug #818955
set alias hostname for all local host names
handle fqdns as aliases (Bug #814981)
switch timecall off by default
hostname(): do not strip FQDN if requested
added some debugging code
added nut module
added SlowRequester
and of course we must close SAVEERR - otherwise background() will not work
proginit(): suppress error output when doing setlogsock() - we do our best to catch errors so we don't want them to be printed
added extraheaders/extraheadersvalue support
Syslog: use one of stream, unix, inet (setlogsock())
test MicroTime.pm and set avoid_gettimeofday_syscall accordingly
made etc_resources be managed by configure script: renamed to etc_resources.in, added to AC_OUTPUT rule
use Time::HiRes if available ... don't use syscall if resources say 'no'
added solSwap monitor
skip empty lines
fixed single_value "domain" setting: it's consistently "static", now
fixed single_value "domain" setting: it's consistently "static", now
added install-agent target so that we are in sync with the docu
use -r option with useradd in order to create a system user
we intentionally called (main::)abort()
added Herb Rubin's sample uxmon-net config file and altered the default files accordingly
$Usage is in BigSister::common namespace