[Novalug] pbnj and alternatives

[Rich Goodwin]

On Fri, 2010-04-02 at 09:25 -0400, Peter Larsen wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-04-02 at 11:58 +0000, Miguel Gonzalez wrote:
> 
> 
> > At work we are going to give a try a tool called pbnj. 
> 
> hehe - is that a joke name?? PBnJ?? :D Must be some sticky stuff.

Yeah - it started out as SMuckers!  ;-)
> 
> > Essentially performs routine scans (with nmap) over a range of IPs and
> > stores the results in a database. Then it tells you if a port has
> > changed its state (from up to down or viceversa - however I'm digging
> > the code to add a "new" state too). 
> 
> Very strange and maybe not too safe way of monitoring your network.
> Scanning is usually a behavior that would trigger alarms. You also tax
> your servers opening ports that aren't really used hence waiting for TCP
> timeouts or resets - producing log entries warning of potential
> problems.
> 
> >   Before reinventing the wheel, I'd like to know if there is any tool
> > like this with better functionality (it's pretty basic, a perl script,
> > the reports and the routine scans have to be configured manually). 
> 
> This is what NMS systems do - and do very well. There's a ton of them
> out there. Nagios, OpenNMS to just mention a few. If you're looking for
> just monitoring basic services, Webmin actually has a very nice
> "clustered" feature where you monitor vital services on every server and
> if something happens, from the node going down or a service failing you
> can either have an automated script fire or notify someone. Nagios and
> OpenNMS does the same thing too.
> 
> They do this without scanning the network. Instead they use one of
> several approaches: SNMP, agent based or WMI (for windows). There are
> also options to setup agents that does REAL Bind, SMTP or HTTP to test
> that specific services are configured right. For instance, if your httpd
> daemon is running but your virtual host configuration is in failure and
> this advanced daemon would notify you of that. 
> 
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