passive checks via smtp? or similar

[Demetri Mouratis]

On Tue, 11 Jan 2005, Matt Johnson wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm trying to monitor a host the other side of a very
> restrictive firewall.
>
> The host *can* send mail via smtp to the nagios server
> (my side). Is there a simple (and not very secure) way
> of having nagios expect regular emails from a host, or
> it registers that host as unknown or down?
>
> I know this has flaws, but it *seems* to be all I
> have..?
>
> Thanks for any advice to think round this one.

I'm doing exactly this for the same reasons you mention above.  I figured
outbound SMTP would be perceived as innocuous by even the most anal (best)
firewall admin.

In my case, I have many distributed Nagios boxes talking to one central.
I use global service event handlers to send the data through SMTP after
first passing it to GPG for encryption.

The messages arrive at the central box and are GPG decrypted and dumped
into the nagios.cmd command pipe for processing.  I set up a single
freshness check on a service called distributed-nagios.  This way, a break
in the flow of SMTP messages will trigger an alert that indicates an
underlying problem as oppsed to a problem on the distributed side itself.

Hope that helps.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Demetri Mouratis
dmourati at linfactory.com



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