[Box Backup] Checking that bbackupd's are backing up?

[Ben Summers]

On 15 Sep 2004, at 16:40, Per Thomsen wrote:

> On 9/15/04 2:02 AM, Ben Summers wrote:
>>
>> This is quite apart from the fact that if bbackupd doesn't see 
>> anything to upload, it won't even contact the server.
>
> Right. That's something that I'd have to deal with anyway. I am also 
> considering writing a Nagios (www.nagios.org) service to check the 
> 'aliveness' of bbackupd on the client, and bbstored on the server. 
> This would let me know if the bbackupd daemon was not running. That 
> might be a better way to go, long term. Of course, that only helps if 
> you're already running Nagios (not a system I'd set up to check for 
> just one or two things).

Nagios looks interesting. How would the plugin work? Attempt to make a 
connection to the server and check that the client has scanned the 
files recently (timestamp of /var/bbackupd/last_sync_finish), or just 
read the PID file and see if that process is active?

[snip]
>>
>> I would like to get it right first time. Perhaps I could ask someone 
>> to start a specification document, which we can all revise until 
>> we're happy with it? I'd like it to be fairly detailed, specifying 
>> exactly how the user will interact with the system, and then I'll get 
>> it implemented in 0.09.
>
> My time is limited, but I'd love to get the ball rolling. I should be 
> able to pull something together by early next week. Any preferred 
> formats?

That would be great. Plain text would be a good format, nice and easy 
to read and discuss on mailing lists.

Thanks,

Ben