monitor windows remote desktop from linux

[Paul Weaver]

> Yeah, I understand what you mean. The problem is that before 
> you can monitor, you have to identify what exactly needs to 
> be monitored. And that's where the troubleshooting comes in. 

I disagree. The OP would like to monitor remote desktop logins. As an
admin, I care that RDP is broken, not (neccersarilly) that the clock is
out of sync.

> From then on, it could be anything from an authentication 
> issue to a protocol issue to an encryption issue, clock skew 
> (I'm not sure if the encryption in RDP is time-sensitive. I 
> don't think it is, but wanted to mention it), and the 
> monitoring needs to reflect the specific problem you are 
> monitoring for. 
> If you don't know what exactly is going wrong, there is a 
> high likelihood that you are monitoring the wrong thing and 
> don't actually detect when the users are experiencing a 
> problem - just as you saw with the sockets.

An ideal check would be for some meatware to sit infront of a computer,
log in with a few user names, check that the login is succesful, and
push a button which sets the nagios state to "green". If they have a
problem, push a different button to set the light to "red".

You may be able to get a perl module that can control remote desktop,
have a system log in, run a command, and log out. A quick google doesn't
show anything up, and experimentation with "rdesktop -u USER -d DOMAIN
-p PASS -s SOMETHING.EXE $HOSTADDRESS$" seems to leave the session
logged in. You could create SOMETHING.EXE which made a call back to
nagios to say "I'm working", but you'd need to get windows to log out
afterwards. A bit of windows scripting would probably do that for you,
so you would have something like

<nagiosside>
$ok = 0;
$port = 2345;
while ($ok == 0) {
	$port++;
	$ok = listenOnPort($port)
}
run_in_foreground("rdesktop -u USER -d DOMAIN -p PASS -s
"remote_check.wsh $nagiosaddress $port" $HOSTADDRESS$");
my ($status, $info) = receivedMsg();
print $info;
exit $status;

<windowsside>
my ($nagiosaddress, $port) = shift;
open_socket("$nagiosaddress:$port");
print_socket("OK,Remote Desktop OK for user $USER");
close_socket();
logout();

For already-written plugins, check_x224 will give a better check than
check_tcp. 
--
Paul Weaver	
Systems Development Engineer
News Production Facilities, BBC News

http://www.bbc.co.uk/
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