Dear Gentle Folk,
I operate a small farm of servers, all running postfix, sendmail
(blech) or exim (blech**2).
We ping everything every minute and if a server fails a ping x
number of times I get beeped. This works well for hard downs, but a
server can be pingable and still be very down or non functional.
So we also have a buddy system.
Every minute a cgi on each server sends an e-mail to
[email protected], and the buddy server records the time and
date of receipt.
Every minute a cron job runs on buddy which determines if one of
the expected servers has not reported in for x minutes. If so it beeps
me under the assumption the server is down.
This works very well, except some times the incoming e-mails gang
up in phase, and other issues make it unweildly.
It occurs to me it would be more scalable and useful if the buddy
server itself could send a mail through each of the other servers back
to itself, thus proving the remote server is up enough to both receive a
mail and send it back.
For example, our barracuda's (blech) favorite mode of failure is to
receive mail but then not pass it on until the queues over flow. And it
has no way to run my script to send mail to the buddy server every
minute.
This new idea would allow me to monitor any server running sendmail
even if I didn't have access to run my cgi's on it.
So using /etc/postfix/transport I have rigged one of the other
remote servers to send mail both as itself to the buddy server, and
through the barracuda to the buddy server, and this seems to work.
But /etc/postfix/transport seems inadvisably clumsy with 30 servers
all being sent through by the buddy server back to itself, and I am not
sure what the ultimate transport file would look like without giving the
buddy server a different virtual host name for each remote server
reporting to it.
We are trying to get server A, to send mail through many other
servers, back to server A.
It would be useful if the 'smart host' could be specified on
the sendmail command line, but alas I don't think this is possible.
If someone has a bright idea to simplify all this I am all ears.
Go Postfix!
Thanks in advance.
Homer W. Smith
CEO Lightlink Internet
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Homer Wilson Smith Clean Air, Clear Water, Art Matrix - Lightlink
(607) 277-0959 A Green Earth, and Peace, Internet, Ithaca NY
[email protected] Is that too much to ask? http://www.lightlink.com
