About a active plugin in local machine

[Paul L. Allen]

Matt Luettgen writes: 

> I would agree with this, accept I've seen many machines that were 'dead'
> and still responded to ping.

I've seen machines that complete the TCP three-way handshake for a service
but don't get any further.  The problem is usually that of running out of
some critical resource needed to fork off the service to handle the
connection although the TCP stack itself continues to function. 

Check_ping is a very poor test of a service.  Check_telnet is a little
better but all it really tells you is that you have a functioning stack,
not that the service behind it is running correctly.  A check that tests
for a response from the service (like a 220 response from SMTP) is better
still.  Best of all would be a check that runs through the whole sequence,
such as sending mail on port 25 and checking that the final response is OK
(because you might get a temporary or permanent failure code when SMTP
tries to queue or deliver the mail), although that's probably too much
overhead if you're monitoring lots of servers. 

-- 
Paul Allen
Softflare Support 




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