Hosts w/o services

[Ford, Andy]

Well, if you dig, I think you will find that you can monitor much more
than you think. 

In fact, to take one example you mentioned: printers.

If I was in charge of monitoring the availability of the boss's printer,
I would have Nagios run a test printout every morning that would either
return a status or, if it's an old printer that's less intelligent, I'd
have a piece of paper in the output tray that I'd pick up on my way to
my desk!
At that point, you know not only that it's turned on, but that the toner
is good, it's not jammed, and a bunch of other stuff.

Even in the worst case scenario of a dot matrix printer connected via
serial line, you can whip up a plugin that sends a printout via a
command line tool with "lpr" or some other old standby. Samba might come
in hand there.

This may not be applicable to your printer, but for instance:

[forda at hqnagpl1 ~]$ /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_hpjd -h
check_hpjd (nagios-plugins 1.4.8) 1.35
Copyright (c) 1999 Ethan Galstad <nagios at nagios.org>
Copyright (c) 2000-2006 Nagios Plugin Development Team
        <nagiosplug-devel at lists.sourceforge.net>

This plugin tests the STATUS of an HP printer with a JetDirect card.
Net-snmp must be installed on the computer running the plugin.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Israel Brewster [mailto:israel at frontierflying.com] 
> Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2008 2:20 PM
> To: Ford, Andy
> Cc: Nagios Users Mailinglist
> Subject: Re: [Nagios-users] Hosts w/o services
> 
> On Apr 16, 2008, at 10:10 AM, Ford, Andy wrote:
> >
> > <advice tag='unsolicited'>
> > There must be some reason for each server or device to be on the
> > network, it must provide some service, even if it's just a lowly(?)
> > sshd.
> > Do yourself and your organization a favor and monitor that reason!
> > </advice>
> 
> To some extent, yes, but not necessarily a service we can monitor.  
> There are quite a few devices on the network that it is important to  
> us to know should the device fail, but aren't offering any 
> separately  
> monitorable "service", per se. For example, printers. We need 
> to know  
> if one dies, so we can fix it before it becomes a problem (not to  
> mention that fixing the boss's printer before he even knows it has a  
> problem makes you look good ;-) ), but other than the simple 
> ping host  
> check, they don't offer any "services" we can monitor.


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