spong.conf

NAME
DESCRIPTION
FILES
SEE ALSO
AUTHOR
HISTORY

NAME

spong.conf - provides configuration information to spong programs.

DESCRIPTION

The spong.conf file defines variables that are used by all pieces of spong. This file ( and if it exists spong.conf.<hostname> file ) gets imported by each of the spong programs

The variables are grouped by the spong programs. Each section will list the variables that are used in the program along with the meaning of the variable to the program.

This sections deals with variables that are used by all of the Spong programs. Any differences in how the programs use the variable will be detailed in the "Configuration Variables" section of the program's documentation.

$SPONGSLEEP (Depreciated)

This variable holds the amount in time in seconds) that spong client programs (i.e. spong-client and spong-network) are expected to sleep between checking cycles. For spong-server this is the time to live for statuses. If a status has not been updated in 2 * $SPONGSLEEP seconds it is considered to be old and the color is set to 'purple'. For www-spong, $SPONGSLEEP represents the amount of time to automatically refresh the web page.

$SPONGSLEEP{'DEFAULT'}, $SPONGSLEEP{'<program-name>'}

This the new method for specifying the $SPONGSLEEP interval for Spong programs. If there is not $SPONGSLEEP{} entry for the program, it will use the $SPONGSLEEP{'DEFAULT'} value. If no value is then found, the spong program will fall back to using $SPONGSLEEP.

$SPONGSERVER

The host that, at the least, the the spong-server entry elsewhere in this document and the spong-message entry elsewhere in this document programs are running on. Typically the the spong-network entry elsewhere in this document program runs on that host as well.

Multiple hosts can now be specified in <$SPONGSERVER>. This allows you to run mutiple Spong Server instances for multiple monitored domains, and eventually High Availability functionality.

The fully syntax is:

   spong-server1.example.com[:port] [spong-server2.example.org[:port] ...]

The '[:port]' specified the port the update process is listening on for that Spong Server. See the $SPONG_UPDATE_PORT entry elsewhere in this document for more information. The default value is 1998.

$SPONG_UPDATE_PORT

This variable defines the port that the the spong-server entry elsewhere in this document update process listens on. If this variable is not defined on the $SPONGSERVER host, the the spong-server entry elsewhere in this document update process will not be started. The default value is 1998.

$SPONG_QUERY_PORT

This variable defines the port that the the spong-server entry elsewhere in this document query process listens on. If this variable is not defined on the $SPONGSERVER host, the the spong-server entry elsewhere in this document query process will not be started. The default value is 1999.

$SPONG_BB_UPDATE_PORT

This variable defines the port that the Big Brother BBSERVER emulation process listens on. If this variable is not defined on the $SPONGSERVER host, the Big Brother BBSERVER emulation process will not be started. The default value is 1984.

$SPONGTMP

A temporary directory where output from some commands are kept for short periods of time. For security reasons, this should probably be something other then /tmp, or /var/tmp.

$SPONG_LOG_FILE

If set to 1, spong-network will log errors to a log file in $SPONGTMP named spong-network.log.

$SPONG_LOG_SYSLOG

If set to 1, spong-network will log errors to the syslog using the USER facility and the ERR priority.

$TIMEFMT

A string that contains strftime() presentation symbols for formatting time displays which have hours, minutes and seconds. The default is "%H:%M:%S".

$TIMEFMTNOSEC

A string that contains strftime() presentation symbols for formatting time displays which have hours and minutes. The default is "%H:%M".

$DATEFMT

A string that contains strftime() presentation symbols for formatting date displays. The default is "%m/%d/%y" (i.e numeric month / numeric day / year w/o century ).

$DATETIMEFMT

A string that contains strftime() presentation symbols for formating a full date and time display. The default is "%c" (preferred date and time representation for the current locale. And alternate format might be "$DATEFMT, $TIMEFMT".

spong-server

$SPONGDB: This defines the directory where the Spong database will be stored. Each host will have a subdirectory in this directory which is named for the host.
$SPONGSTATUS: If this variable is set to 1, it will enable the storing of the update status message information for each event that is generated in the history log. This status message information is access via the web interface by click on the status color or icon link of an event in a History Listing.
$SPONG_SERVER_ALARM: This variable defined the maximum amount of time (in seconds) that a incoming connection of a status message can last. Once the time limit is exceeded spong-server will terminated the connection. This action can be disables by setting the variable to zero (0).
$WWW_FQDN: Set this variable to 1 to display the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of hosts in Spong client displays. Otherwise only the first element of the FQDN will be displayed. If the host has a 'display_name' attribute, it will be used in preference to the FQDN names.
$HISTORY_FQDN: Set this varirable to 1 to display teh fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of hosts in History displays display clients. Otherwise only the first element of the FQDN will be displayed. If the host has a 'display_name' attribute, it will be used in preference to the FQDN names.
$SEND_MESSAGE: $SEND_MESSAGE defines when spong-message is called by spong-server. This variable can contain one of four valid values. If it is ``RED'', then spong-message is called for every time a system or service reports a problem. If its value is ``CHANGE'', then spong-message is only called when there is a change of state . If this values is ``RED-CHANGE'', then spong-message is called; every time a system of service reported a problem and when the condition is cleared. (going from green/yellow to red, and then again going from red to green/yellow). If its value is ``NONE'', then spong-message is never called.

www-spong

$WWW_USE_IMAGES: The variable controls how services status colors are displayed on the web displays. If set to 1, service status colors are represented by colored icons. Otherwise the colors are represented by blocks of color.
The default value is 0. If $WWW_USE_IMAGES is set, the the section on $WWWGIFS elsewhere in this document variable must set to the location of the images directory.
$WWWGIFS: When the section on $WWW_USE_IMAGES elsewhere in this document is set to 1, this variable should be set to the URL path of the www/gifs directory within the document tree of the web server.
The typical setup is to alias the /www directory of your installation to a location in your document tree, for example alias /spong/ /usr/local/spong/www/. Then set $WWWGIFS to /spong/gifs.
$WWWDOCS: This is the URL path of the www/docs directory of within the document tree of the web server.
The typical setup is to alias the /www directory of your installation to a location in your document tree, for example alias /spong/ /usr/local/spong/www/. Then set $WWWDOCS to /spong/docs.
$WWWHTML: This should be the full path name to the www/html directory of your Spong installation.
$WWWSPONG: This should be the URL path to the location of the the www-spong entry elsewhere in this document CGI program with your web server's document tree.
$WWW_ACTIONBAR_CUSTOM: The variable defined HTML code that will be appended to the Action Bar at the top of Host Displays in the right frame of the web client interface. This code is eval'ed before display. You can include perl code and variables. The perl variable $name holds the FQDN of the host being displayed.
$WWW_PROB_ACTIONBAR: This variable is similar in function to the $WWW_ACTIONBAR_CUSTOM variable. Except this action bar is display after each host listed in the problem frame (left) of the client web interface.
$WWW_TITLE_ACTIONBAR: This variable can host HTML code that will be appended to the action bar that is display in the title (top) frame of the client web display. This code is eval'ed before display. You can include perl code and variables. This action bar is only displays if the section on $WWWFRAMES elsewhere in this document is set to 3.
$WWW_TITLE_COLOR: Defines the background color for table title cells in the client web interface. The colors are defined in the HTML color format.
$WWW_CELL_COLOR: This variable defined the background color for normal table cells in the client web interface. The colors are defined in the HTML color format.
$WWW_COLOR{...}: This perl hash contains the HTML color codes for the various Spong status colors. The can tweak the colors to your own preferences. It is strongly suggested that you don't move the colors outside of their color family, unless you throughly document your changes.
$WWWFRAMES: This determined the type of frame interface that is used in the web interface client of the www-spong entry elsewhere in this document. The variable can be set to 2 or 3. The default value is 2. See the user-guide entry elsewhere in this document for more information.
$WWW_TITLE_SIZE: This sets the vertical size of the title frame when the section on $WWWFRAMES elsewhere in this document is set to 3. The values is a integer indication the number of points (as in font sizes). The default value is 40.
@WWW_REFRESH_ALLOW: A list of Perl regular expressions that are checked against the REMOTE_ADDR, REMOTE_HOST and REMOTE_USER environmental CGI parables. If there is a match on any of these variables the www-spong entry elsewhere in this document will attach a REFRESH meta tag to reload the web pages every the $SPONGSLEEP entry elsewhere in this document seconds. See the the admin-guide/"$WWW_REFRESH Logic" entry elsewhere in this document for more details.
@WWW_REFRESH_DENY: A list of Perl regular expressions that are checked against the REMOTE_ADDR, REMOTE_HOST and REMOTE_USER environmental CGI parables. If there is a match on any of these variables, the www-spong entry elsewhere in this document will NOT attach a REFRESH meta tag. User's must use the Reload/Refresh button on their web browser to update the Spong web pages. See the the admin-guide/"$WWW_REFRESH Logic" entry elsewhere in this document for more details.
$WWWCONTACT: This is a partial URL to a CGI script that can do paging for systems. If it is used a "Contact" link will appear on Tool Bar on Spong Web Displays. Refer to the the User Guide|user-guide entry elsewhere in this document for more details.
There not sample CGI script provided. To create please see the admin-guide/"Custom Contacts" entry elsewhere in this document. The variable is commented out and is not used by default.

www-spong-ack

$WWWSPONGACK: This should be the URL path to the location of the the www-spong-ack entry elsewhere in this document CGI program with your web server's document tree.

spong-cleanup

$SPONG_ARCHIVE: The directory where to put old history file entries for each host. Each host has it's own file in this directory.
$OLD_HISTORY: This is the number of days of history to keep for each host in the spong-server database. Any old history is append to the file for the host under the $SPONG_ARCHIVE directory.
$OLD_SERVICE: This is the number of days to retain stale service status (i.e. purple status) entries in the spong-server database. Any service service status entries older than <$OLD_SERVICE> days old are deleted from the database.

spong-client

@DFIGNORE: A list of regular expression strings that are matched against the raw file system names. If matched, then that file system is ignored. For example, having ``:'' in this list will cause NFS file system mounts to be ignored.
%DFWARN, %DFCRIT: A hash of file systems (or the word ``ALL''), and the percentage that should trigger a problem (%DFWARN triggers warnings - yellow, and %DFCRIT triggers alerts - red). If a file system is not explicitly listed in this hash then it will fall back to the value of the ``ALL'' entry.
$CPUWARN, $CPUCRIT: A number indicating the CPU load that triggers a problem ($CPUWARN triggers warnings - yellow, and $CPUCRIT triggers alerts - red).
@PROCSWARN, @PROCSCRIT: A list of processes that should be running, if they are not running, then trigger a problem (processes in @PROCSWARN trigger a warning - yellow, and processes in @PROCSCRIT trigger an alert - red).
$LOGCHECKS: A list of hashes which defined checks to apply to log files. Each hash contains the fields logfile which is the full path to the log file to check and checks which is a list of check to apply to the log file. Each check is a hash that contains the fields: pattern - a Perl regular expression to be scanned for, status - the status color to reported lines matching pattern, duration - the duration that each event is to be reported to the server, text- the text to reported back in the detailed message field of the status report (which can include match position variables from pattern) and id - an optional key field to associated with each event generated. See the the check_logs manpage documentation for more information and examples.
%HTTPDOCS, %HTTPPORT: These variables provide some parameters when checking http based servers. The %HTTPDOCS variable is keyed by host (or the string ``ALL'' for all hosts), and contains as a value, a list of documents to check on that host. The default setting is to search for the ``/robots.txt'' file on all hosts.
The %HTTPPORT variable contains the port number that web server on a given host is running on. By default the value is 80, but this can be overridden on a host by host basis.

spong-message

$MESSAGES_PER_HOUR: This is the maximum number of messages that are sent to the same person in an hour. All message past this number are just logged to the history file, but are not sent. This helps to prevent against message overload such as when you have a networking problem, and everything appears to go red at once. The default value is 5.
$IDENT_MESSAGES_PER_HOUR: This is the maximum number of identical messages that are sent to the same person in an hour. The default value is 3.

OS SPECIFIC VARIABLES

These are various external programs that Spong uses to gather system information to evaluate in it's checks. It is strongly> recommended that you use the full path names for the values of these variables.

$DF, $UPTIME, $PS, $GREP, $PING, $TRACEROUTE, $MAILQ: These variables are OS specific variables, which are hopefully set correctly for your machine, if they are not - please send me email letting me know what OS you are running on, and what the correct value should be.

FILES

SPONGHOME/etc/spong.conf: This is the standard spong.conf file that is read by all spong programs.
SPONGHOME/etc/spong.conf.[host]: This is a spong.conf file that if it exists on a given host, it will be read after the standard spong.conf file is read. Since the configuration files are just Perl code, anything you set in the host specific spong.conf file will override the standard configuration file. ``host'' can be either the full host name of the machine you are running on (web1.school.edu), or just the name minus the domain (web1). It looks for the full name first, and then if it can not find it - it looks for the shorter name.

AUTHOR

Ed Hill <ed-hill@uiowa.edu>, Unix System Administrator, The University of Iowa

Stephen L Johnson <sjohnson@monsters.org>

HISTORY

Based on code/ideas from Sean MacGuire (BB), and Helen Harrison (Pong). Ed Hill original converted Big Brother (http://www.bb4.com) into Perl which diverged from Big Brother to become Spong. Ed Hill continued Spong development until version 2.1. Stephen L Johnson took over development in October, 1999 with his changes which became Spong 2.5.

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