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+ <title>Spong FAQ</title>
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+<body>
+
+<h1>
+Spong Frequently Asked Questions</h1>
+
+<hr WIDTH="100%">
+<br><i>This document contains a list of the most Frequenly Asked Questions
+(FAQ) about Spong. It is really not a HOWTO, but is in a classical Question
+/ Answer form.</i>
+<br>
+<hr WIDTH="100%">
+<br><a href="#what-is-spong">1. What is Spong?</a>
+<br><a href="#why-no-updates">2. Why doesn't my spong-client status updates
+show up on the spong-server?</a>
+<br><a href="#how-to-get-notifications-working">3. How do I get e-mail/paging/alpha
+paging/notifications to work?</a>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>
+<a NAME="what-is-spong"></a>1. What is Spong?</h2>
+his is a <b>simple</b> system monitoring package called spong. It has the
+following features:
+<ul>
+<li>
+client based monitoring (CPU, disk, processes, logs, etc...)</li>
+
+<li>
+monitoring of network services (smtp, http, ping, pop, dns, etc...)</li>
+
+<li>
+grouping of hosts (routers, servers, workstations, PCs)</li>
+
+<li>
+rules based messaging when problems occur</li>
+
+<li>
+configurable on a host by host basis</li>
+
+<li>
+results displayed via text or web based interface</li>
+
+<li>
+history of problems</li>
+
+<li>
+verbose information to help diagnosis problems</li>
+</ul>
+This is hopefully a *simple* tool. It does not compete with Tivoli, OpenView,
+UniCenter, or any other commercial packages, and I have no intention of
+trying to turn it into one. It is not SNMP based, it communicates via simple
+TCP based messages. It is written in Perl, so hopefully it can be run on
+multiple systems (including NT - although it has not been ported yet -
+but is on the todo list).
+<br>
+<h2>
+<a NAME="why-no-updates"></a>2. Why doesn't my spong-client status update
+show up on the spong-server</h2>
+If your spong-client is setup and runs properly (i.e. spong-client --debug
+shows that the ehcks are being run and the results are being sent to the
+spong-server). Depending on how your server is setu, the full domain name
+of your host may not returned with the code that spong-client uses.
+<p>The spong-server has a bit of security for status update messages. The
+host name in the status message must match a host name defined in the spong.hosts
+files. spong-client uses the gethostbyname() function to try to resolve
+the host's full name. If it just gets the host name without the domain,
+spong-server will quietly reject and drop the message.
+<p>You can run the perl snippet below to determine what host name that
+spong-client is resolving for the machine it is running on.
+<p>perl -MSys::Hostname -e 'print gethostbyname(&Sys::Hostname::hostname(),"\n"
+'
+<p>It should print out you the fully qualified domain name of your system.
+This should match the hostname configured in the song.hosts file on the
+spong-server macine. If they don't match then you can do 1 of 2 things.
+In your hosts file make use that the full domain name is the first name
+of your host's line. i.e.
+<p>192.168.2.34 my-host.inkcom.com my-host
+<p>Or put if your system is in your DNS server properly, make sure that
+'dns' is in front of 'file' on the hosts: line of the /etc/nsswitch.conf
+file.
+<p>There a utility <b>gethost-test</b> in the <i>/utils</i> directory of
+the Spong distribution. You can run it on a machine to make sure that it
+is setup correctly to resolve it's full quality domain name. The utility
+is run by enter the following command '<i>perl gethost-test'.</i>
+<h2>
+<a NAME="how-to-get-notifications-working"></a>3. How do I get e-mail/paging/alpha
+paging/notifications to work?</h2>
+The most important thing is to go through the spong.conf, spong.hosts,
+and spong.messge configuration files. And be sure to read the documention
+for <b><a href="spong_conf.html">spong.conf</a></b>, <b><a href="spong_hosts.html">spong.hosts</a></b>,
+<b><a href="spong_message.html">spong.message</a></b>,
+configuration files and the <b><a href="spong-message.html">spong-message</a></b>
+and
+<b><a href="spong-server.html">spong-server</a></b> programs.
+<p>If your are still having problems, follow the check list below to help
+resolve your problem.
+<br>
+<ol>
+<li>
+In spong.conf make sure the $SEND_MESSAGE is set to 'RED', 'CHANGE' or
+'RED-CHANGE'.</li>
+
+<br>
+<li>
+.In spong.mesage make sure that $RULES_MATCH is set to 'ALL' or 'FIRST-MATCH'.</li>
+
+<br>If you set it to 'OLD', spong-message will revert to an old notification
+method.
+<br>
+<li>
+ If your are having problems with defining your rules, put in a very
+minimal rules set.</li>
+<pre>
+ $MESSAGING_RULES = [
+ {
+ contacts => [ 'sjohnson' ]
+ },
+ ];
+</pre>
+<p>This will send everything to the 'sjohnson' contact.
+<br>
+<li>
+In spong.hosts, you must define at least one contact (the %HUMANS in spong.hosts)
+in order to have any notifications sent. for the example rule setup above,
+to get e-mail sent to that user you can have an entry like:</li>
+<br>
+<p><pre>
+ %HUMANS = (
+ 'sjohnson' => {
+ name => 'Stephen Johnson',
+ email => 'stephen.johnson@mailhost.at.my.com',
+ },
+ );
+</pre><br>
+<li>
+And you can test your $MESSAGING_RULES defined in spong.message, your can
+run spong-message in debugging mode to see what is happening step by step:</li>
+<p><pre>spong-message --debug red hostname.my.com disk 98765432 'This is a test'</pre><br>
+<p>This will generate a lot of verbose output. you might want to redirect
+it to to a file. spong-message counts rules starting with 0 just to be forewarned.
+
+</ol>
+<br>
+<p>
+<hr WIDTH="100%">
+<h1>
+<a NAME="spong-server_author_0"></a>AUTHOR</h1>
+Stephen L Johnson (<a href="MAILTO:stephen.johnson@mail.state.ar.us">stephen.johnson@mail.state.ar.us</a>)
+or (<a href="MAILTO:sjohnson@monsters.org">sjohnson@monsters.org</a>),
+Unix System Administator, DIS - State of Arkansas
+<p>Based on code/ideas from Sean MacGuire (BB), and Helen Harrison (Pong).
+</body>
+</html>
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