Re: [afnog] [Mailer-Daemon at mantse.gh.com: Mail delivery failed:returning message to sender]

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer at nic.fr>]

On Mon, Oct 13, 2003 at 09:50:56AM +0100,
 Brian Candler <B.Candler at pobox.com> wrote 
 a message of 38 lines which said:

> 12 x 2KB = 24KB.

The main problem here is not the disk space but the human time needed
to process the messages. The more verbose the alarm system is, the
more likely it is to be ignored (a very general security problem: when
your firewall buzzes every minute, you soon ignore its alarms).

> > Instead, you should use a proper scheduler like mon
> > <URL:http://wwwkernel.org/sofwtare/mon/> which can:

And you should use a proper URL
<URL:http://www.kernel.org/software/mon/>.

> Certainly, you can install something fancy and complicated if you
> like.

mon is very simple and not fancy. People who want something fancy and
complicated install OpenView or, if they prefer free software,
Nagios. I do not think you can run a network operator, even a small
one, without an alarm scheduler, anyway.

> Equally, you could argue that you should have snmpd running and a
> centralised NOC workstation which logs and graphs every variable on
> your system.

It is a different issue, statistics vs. alarms.

__________________________________________________
This is the Africa Network Operators' Group(AfNOG) 
technical discussion list.
The AfNOG website is: <http://www.afnog.org>