[lug] Automatic removal of cron job by cron script

[karl horlen]

You brought up lots of stuff I never considered. 
Probably not necessary for my small implementation but
good to know.  

In particular, I've always wondered how alerts are
generated to cell phones and pagers.  It sounds like
the majority of that work is not really server driven
but happens at the email or messaging provider.

Meaning that my server monitor chugs away as usual and
simply generates an alert email when required.  It's
then up to my email and or phone provider to be able
to forward the message to a remote device like a cell
phone, blackberry or other device that can handle the
incoming message.  That would be either an instant
message, email, prerecorded voice message or alarm.

Does that sound right?

I've never owned a cell phone, blackberry and
fortunately haven't had to wear a pager for a number
of years now.  So I'm definitely behind the times as
far as this goes.

 
> > I would think you'd want to have the alert send
> messages for as long  
> > as
> > the error is detected, up until the error is
> cleared.
> 
> You've never been paged by a monitoring system
> during a data-center  
> power outage that takes down over 400 monitored
> items, have you?  :-)
> 
> If there's one thing I've learned being on-call 24/7
> for almost (oh  
> lord, has it been that long?) 11 years now...
> 
> You ALWAYS want a way to SHUT IT UP remotely... not
> from a command  
> line, but from the device you're being plastered
> with.
> 
> (At one point in my past the bosses even paid for an
> IVR system that  
> was scriptable with events and we could both have it
> call us for  
> really bad stuff and announce it in voice, as well
> as call into it on  
> an 800 number and tell it to run certain scripts...
> one of those  
> scripts was the "SHUT IT ALL UP" script.  But even
> though it was  
> relatively cost-effective, I haven't seen too many
> places go that far  
> ever since then.  It was kinda cool... it could also
> call on escalated  
> ticket system tickets.
> 
> (I suppose a properly scripted Asterisk box --
> especially if you were  
> already using Asterisk anyway -- could do much of
> what that very  
> proprietary system could do back then... cheaper,
> today.)
> 
> 2-way pagers can be the best and the worst in the
> monitoring  
> environment... most carriers actually store ALL
> messages and guarantee  
> delivery.  And most devices will only hold 20 at a
> time and "block" on  
> receiving anymore until you clear the 20.
> 
> SMS is a mixed-bag.  Some carriers hold some
> messages but have an  
> upper limit.  Some drop anything over a specific
> rate of messages from  
> the same source.  Never saw one that
> stored/guaranteed everything...  
> lots of messages go to the bit-bucket in the
> SMS/cell phone world, but  
> they try not to... it'll really tick you off when
> the most important  
> system-generated message of the day doesn't hit
> anyone's phone.  I  
> don't trust SMS only with my "life", that's for
> sure.
> 
> Blackberries with real push e-mail as well as Treo's
> (when you can  
> keep them from spontaneously rebooting all on their
> own every few  
> days) work great, and usually can be used for SSH or
> other forms of  
> "reply/control", too.
> 
> Mobile broadband cards and never logging out of your
> laptop ever are  
> also an option, I suppose.  Ha... not one that I'd
> want but hey, a  
> free company sponsored mobile broadband card for key
> personnel  
> actually would be more sane than most VPN setups
> I've seen for support  
> people over the years.  Trying to remain "near your
> house" to have  
> broadband access is highly annoying when you're
> never really "not on  
> call"... and more than one network element has been
> fixed via stolen  
> 802.11, I'm sure!
> 
> Data center outages are a great stress test for your
> chosen text  
> messaging system.  You can learn a lot about how
> your carrier handles  
> floods of text messages in the post-mortem.  :-)
> 
> >
> Anyway, just my two cents... always have a "MAKE
> THAT DAMNED THING  
> SHUT UP" button that is EASY to "push" remotely for
> large outages.
> 
> Multiple techs (who of course, already know about
> the problem)  
> standing in front of racks in the data center
> reaching down to clear  
> 20 messages at a time from their pagers for an hour
> while also trying  
> to type and bring things back online is quite
> comical, for about the  
> first 10 minutes of it.
> 
> --
> Nate Duehr
> nate at natetech.com
> 
> 
> 
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