tlug: Watching servers: information overload

[Darren Cook <darren@example.com>]

Various cron jobs (backups, log rotation,etc.) send emails to say they've
done. The problem with this is that if you get the email everythings okay,
and if you don't there's a problem. But noticing you've not got an email is
hard.

So I want to set up two machines (A and B) to watch each other. My plan so
far is:
  A runs it's cron job to do the backup. It makes a report file.
  B runs a cron job an hour later, to ftp in to A and get that file. If the
file is not there, or the date stamp is not today, or the file size is very
different from yesterdays file, it sends an email. Otherwise it writes one
line in a log file to say everything okay.

I want to expand this to checking servers are running every hour, checking
disk space is above a certain amount, etc.

Does anyone see any flaw in this plan. Do you know of any scripts/programs
that can save me some work? Ideally something that will work on both NT and
unix.

Darren

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