Topic: Free Remote SME Server Monitoring - Interest?

[Knuddi]

I was thinking of making a remote SME Server monitor that would check the health of a SME server - primarily focus on its email capabilities and I was wondering whether this has interest for you server admins?

Initially functionality:
- RBL Monitor to check whether your IP or your ISP, if you you smart hosting,  has been listed
- SMTP monitor to check whether you server is online and ready to receive mails.

If any of these events would occur the admin (or configured mail address) would receive an email alert.

Later I was planning, to enhance the email system of the SME server with more advanced inbound spam filter rules that I have developed over the years for my hosted spamfilter company. This would include additional SpamAssassin Rules, validated ClamAV Signatures but also additional plugins to qpsmtpd. The sme-unjunkmgr provides some quarantine functionality but this I will also enhance.

The site can be reached at:
http://smeoptimizer.swerts-knudsen.dk/

Based on the interest I will make a SME contrib that gathers all this, but I just want to see whether there is interest first

Best regards,
Jesper (aka Knuddi)

[purvis]

I like to have reports that are run from a web browser.
If you write some scripts for a web page.
All kinds of programs can access them.
Even other scripts can read web pages and send emails.
I personally don't like having to log into the server manager panel to view a report that has little security concerns.

[Knuddi]

The idea is that you get an email alert if something is wrong and this email alert contains all information that can be determined from the outside. If its a listing in a DNS blacklist you will get the list name and the answer from the list which, in most case, provides a way to get delisted.

No need to log into the server-manager to see whether something is wrong. The server-manager integration was meant as the means to easily provide the external service with information needed to do these tests.

[Knuddi]

Spent the day making a website that allows for yourself to register and add servers for monitoring. The monitoring service will remain FREE for all SME servers that you would want to monitor. Right now it does SMTP checks every 10 minutes and DNS Blacklists once a day.

The site can be reached at:
http://smeoptimizer.swerts-knudsen.dk/

Enjoy,
Jesper

[Stefano]

Jesper, you are the man

Thank you, I will take a look

[purvis]

Knuddi
I see now that the service would not be running on our servers, which I thought that was the intention.
The reason I was suggesting the web page, is because I thought it might be a local thing you where doing.

If it where to be a web page script thing. I was kind of thinking if other things where added later to check for problems of various kinds.
Who knows what that future will bring and changes are always certain.
Then other scripts could be written to read the web page and take what ever action is needed.

I have some cameras set to send emails to the server and also forward those text(actual mms) messages me with pictures to my iphone.
Although I know that is not your situation here but it is great when something can send to multiple email accounts.

Thanks for your work and use of your equipment.


 

[Knuddi]

The intention I had with the local services were only to provide configuration to the hosted solutions so that it would be easy to use.

Yes, it would be very appealing to also monitor other element of a server (load, disk usage, ClamAV, Qpsmtpd, etc.) and this could be done through Nagios NRPE calls. This is on my list as well but certainly require local configuration/installation.

The system already today support that these Alerts are sent to multiple email addresses. You just need to add these with semicolon separation under the  "Alerts" tab.