Any experience with notifications via jabber ?

[Paul L. Allen]

> Does anyone have any experience with notification via jabber that they 
> are willing to share ?

I had a brief look at it.  Figured I'd need to run my own server to
ensure privacy.  Looked at the server comparison chat - the official free
jabber servers don't implement some of the stuff in the jabber specs.  The
whole thing looks very kitchen-sink-ish.  I'm surprised they didn't call
it Lightweight Chat Protocol or Simple Chat Protocol because no protocol
after SMTP that has had "Simple" or "Lightweight" in its name has ever
been either of those things.  The only other way they could signify that
it has far more complications than are desirable would be to call it
Extensible Chat Protocol, but that isn't misleading enough. 

> Does anyone know if its possible to use it to insert the alert into a 
> particular jabber conference (thereby giving a logical multicast) rather 
> than having to send to individual jabber users ?

Probably.  If it's anything like Yahoo, though, you'll need to be
intelligent enough that you start a conference or join a conference
depending upon whether or not the conference already exists.  Oh, and if
it's anything like Yahoo you might need an invite to an existing
conference.  Also if it's anything like Yahoo you'd probably need a
conference rather than individual messaging to avoid a backlog of stored
messages if one of the contacts goes off-line temporarily. 

BTW, on the subject of alerts and instant messaging, the Perl Yahoo
Messenger stuff is no longer actively maintained and stopped working
with Yahoo a couple of YMSG protocol changes ago.  So that's no longer
a viable option if you thought Yahoo might be an alternative.  If you
don't consider "object oriented" to be an alternative spelling of
"obfuscated" then you might be able to fix it by tweaking the
authentication routines to match what is done in libyahoo2.  Alternatively,
you might be able to hack that sample client that comes with libyahoo2 to
take its input from a named pipe, if you wanted to go the Yahoo route. 

To be honest, IRC might be a reasonable alternative.  There's a perl
IRC module, I believe, or you could even write a nagios reporting module
for one of the perl bots like infobot or flooterbuck, although you'd
probably have to hack the polling routine as well because I don't think
either of them have a callback facility.  Those bots already have the
capability of dealing with passworded channels and even passworded
servers, so you can keep the riff-raff out even if you use a public
server.  It's fairly trivial to add "fact packs" to the bots so you
could pre-feed them with useful information and they'd respond to
"foo.com?" with "foo.com is on server-39x."  At the weekend I might have
a quick look at what would be involved in adding an alert system to
flooterbuck - I've almost convinced myself it would be a good idea. 

> On the subject of publish/subscribe notification/informing models, would 
> an RSS of the status page make any sense ?

That might be a better way of doing it, at least if you don't want the
alerts to be in a conference/IRC channel type thing where the humans can
chat to each other as well as getting alerts.  Otherwise if your support
team consists of more than one person you'll need some sort of conference
system anyway where you can argue which one of you is going to deal with
the latest outage. 

-- 
Paul Allen
Softflare Support 




-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.Net email is sponsored by: NEC IT Guy Games.  How far can you shotput
a projector? How fast can you ride your desk chair down the office luge track?
If you want to score the big prize, get to know the little guy.  
Play to win an NEC 61" plasma display: http://www.necitguy.com/?r=20
_______________________________________________
Nagios-users mailing list
Nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nagios-users
::: Please include Nagios version, plugin version (-v) and OS when reporting any issue. 
::: Messages without supporting info will risk being sent to /dev/null