[Box Backup] monitoring bbackupd

[Martin Ebourne]

On Thu, 2005-08-25 at 14:48 -0500, Alex Howansky wrote:
> I've got BoxBackup clients running on about a dozen servers and I'm finding
> that bbackupd dies every once in a while on one or another of them. While I
> suppose that in itself is a bug, what I'm really looking for is a way to be
> able to tell (from a remote server) if that has happened. I've got an existing
> centralized monitoring system and I was hoping to avoid installing some other
> local monitoring system on each machine. Ideally, I'd like to be able to do a
> remote connect to bbackupd over a TCP/IP port, but seems that bbackupd uses
> sockets only. Any ideas?

I actually use nagios on my machines. I've got a script I wrote for it
that restarts any service and it can check remote machines by use of
nagios-nrpe. Don't ever remember the clients dying though.

> I suppose alternatively, that I could use daemontools to keep bbackupd running.
> Does anybody know offhand if fghack works ok in this case? Or is there maybe an
> undocumented switch on bbackupd to prevent it from backgrounding?

You can give it SINGLEPROCESS as the first parameter (look in the self
tests). It's possible that may have other side effects I'm unaware of
though.

Cheers,

Martin.