Notifications by jabber

[Stanley Hopcroft]

Dear Folks,

I am writing with some notes about distributing Nagios alerts to a 
Jabber conference (ie logical multicast distribution of alerts to an 
attractive and pervasive client).

What is in use here is

1 Jabber client - sendxmpp

  a command line Jabber client (requires Net::XMPP from CPAN) that can
  send to a conference (-c option) and also run in interactive (-i) mode 
  in which it reads from stdin and sends each line as a jabber message

2 Jabber server - jabberd 2.0

  still under development but works Ok

3 Jabber viewing clients - Exodus for MS Win, Psi or TkAbber for Unix.

A primitive daemon process (in this case) running on the Nagios 
server

- tails the Nagios log

- applies any necessary filters (eg discard non HARD events) &

- writes the filtered (& possibly transformed events [eg adding 
  emoticons _may_ be possible]) to stdout (connected to the sendxmpp 
  process).

There is at least one GOTCHA, namely that the jabber user that sendxmpp 
uses to send the message (to the conference on the jabber server) must 
have administrative rights (granted by the jabber serve) to be able to 
drop the message in the conference. The process running sendxmpp runs as 
a normal user (eg the same user as the Nagios daemon) but it 
authenticates to the jabber server as a jabber user that has jabber 
admininstrative priviledges.

Without this, jabber clients connected to the conference see the 'nagios 
jabber user' join and leave the conference but the message it drops is 
not visible. This may be a bug in the jabberd 2.0 server since both the 
client and the jabberd server logs show no signs of error or unusual 
messages.

Yours sincerely.



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